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Creationist Movie Expelled with Ben Stein: A Blasphemy to Nazi-Resister Teachers
There were many heroes who resisted Nazi occupation and practices during World War II. Some, like the Norwegian resister Max Manus, are the stuff of legend.
Teachers were among the major, but unsung heroes. When the Nazis occupied Norway, and installed the traitor Quisling as their puppet, they told the nation's teachers that they had to teach Nazi curriculum in the schools. A first-grade math problem asked this: "3 Jews and 2 Africans are in a room. How many inferior people are in the room?" [Note the origins of the rightwing push-pollsters?]
The teachers refused. They said they could only teach that part of the curriculum that was true. Nothing else was possible. The Nazi regime locked them out, and so the teachers went on strike. Civil disobedience in a Nazi state!
The standoff continued. Hitler could not abide it. The teachers' union (yes, Ben Stein, the union!) were imprisoned, and sent to a labor camp in frigid northern Norway. About a third of them died; but, they refused to buckle.
Eventually, Quisling relented. The children needed to be in school so their parents could perform slave labor, sending their products to Germany. The teachers signed a statement indicating that they would teach Nazi curriculum only if it were true.
Ben Stein's Expelled is a polemical film designed to insinuate creationism, aka "Intelligent Design", into science curriculum in the public schools. Stein manufactures a conspiracy theory in which Big Science, Big Media, and Big Government conspire to suppress academic freedom. Rejecting Intelligent Design curriculum is a denial of free inquiry; after all, he says, just teach "the controversy".
What "controversy"? There is not a single scientific experiment ever performed testing so-called intelligent design. There is not a single paper presenting scientific evidence supporting intelligent design. It is not a real controversy, it is manufactured---a manufactroversy ™.
If they can manufacture a controversy, why not manufacture a word to describe it?
Sure, there are questions and unresolved issues in evolution science. And, who knows, some day a revised theory of the universe may alter our understanding of how life evolved. I would be surprised if it did not.
Gaps in the evidence supporting our current understanding of evolution is hardly scientific proof of intelligent design, anymore than it is proof that an alien species arrived on earth, and copulated with apes or the horseshoe crab to produce homo sapiens. If there are gaps in the evidence supporting the science of evolution, why not teach that alternative in the schools as well?
Science classes in schools only teach concepts for which a mountain of evidence has accumulated, when the evidence far outweighs any contradictory information. Without that standard, we could spend the entire middle school and high school curricula teaching any fantasy about human development that had more than 2 parents who promulgated it. Does that not qualify as a "controversy" by Ben Stein's definition?
There is a simple distinction between science and ideology (or theology or philosophy) that students, and adults, should remember: science explains conditions of natural phenomena; ideology (or theology or philosophy) justifies preferences.
As the title of Al Gore's Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth" conveys, science is indifferent to our preferences, it is what it is. Humankind ignores that reality at its peril.
The Soviet Union decided that the facts of genetics provided "inconvenient" truths for its ideology. Denying the scientific facts of inheritance and expression of dominant genes, Soviet agriculture embarked on a nonsensical attempt to grow wheat on frozen tundra resulting in huge losses and the need to import grain just to feed their people.
Ben Stein's father was a famous economist and Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. Would he want our high school students, already 29th in the world in high school science proficiency, to suffer further economic disadvantage by learning non-science propaganda, and thus not even understanding the difference between science and theology? Would he want to follow the communist Soviet Union and allow ideological preferences to trump reality?
That would be like the Norwegian teachers under Nazi rule teaching their students the 'scientific' inferiority of Jews.
Too many brave people, too many brave and principled teachers, sacrificed their lives and were subjected to torture to preserve the dignity of the truth.
Mr. Stein and his creationist funders blaspheme their sacrifice.
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Whenever religion tries to invade science, religion comes out the loser and ends up undermining itself. About 15 years ago, the Catholic Church admitted it was wrong to condemn Galileo's work, namely that the earth revolved around the sun. That was centuries ago. In some sense, religion is still paying the price for having invaded science in that case.
Interesting comparison in terms of the lengths some will go to defend "truth" (I doubt that all those Norweigian teachers were defending Jews, merely the implications of changing the tenents of what was teachable in terms of their own integrity with students).
Stein has clearly imbibed some major Kool Aid here. There is nothing about "intelligent design" that is testable. Therefore, it is NOT science. Science and only science belongs in a biology/chemistry/physics course. You would have to change the accepted definition of what constitutes "science" to accept all sorts of unprovable, unobservable notions. I really like how some kid, using the criteria attempted to support "intelligent design" advocted inserting some idea that aliens caused human evolution. Whichever state was considering introducing ID had to backtrack, given how foolish this kid had made them look (I think he substituted "alien landings" for "intelligent design" in their documents). A science teacher has NO BUSINESS discussing religion with students. He/she can only present what science shows and lets them do what they want, but they beter know what he/she taught. Remember separation of church and state? Sheesh. The bold arrogance of these ppl is mind-blowing. Just imagine if some science teaching attempted to introctrine the "wrong" faith in some district!? Where would it end?
...continued...
But wait! That's what they said about whichever dinosaurs led to birds, not to mention the ones on The Flintstones. Seemingly out of nowhere, if you don't look too closely, the Real New Idea of Intelligent Design , which "doesn't specify a Judeo-Christian God as the Designer, just an unspecified force who did it all on purpose," took the scientific community by storm. Well, not most of the scientific community. Just pretty much the same people as last time, along with a few people they had called crackpots before, and another generation of people who had studied Paleontology just to look for "holes in the theory." Right now, lots of people are back in court, being politely informed that ID is Scientific Creationism in a different lab coat... well, vestment disguised as a lab coat. One case even had, in evidence, an Intelligent Design text which was shown to be previously a Creation Science work, with most of it identical, and words like "creator" replaced with "designer" by search & paste.
So thanks to most of you posting on this thread, and buck up, sanity01, we won't convince YOU any time soon!
I'm thinking Ben doesn't quite discuss the "evolution" of ID in his movie. Heard of it? Let's review! In the beginning, public schools didn't really teach evolution because nobody had thought of it, and they didn't teach creation because that was for SUNDAY SCHOOL, and only parochial schools taught religion. As evolution became part of biological science, schools started teaching it, even many religious schools. But some apparently thought a literal interpretation of Genesis was the key to all religious belief, and civilization would collapse without it (see above). These people influenced their schools to teach Divine creation as science and history, and prosecuted teachers (now THAT was a movie!) who taught evolution, even alongside creationism. However, even though they won Scopes, creationists lost ground, and actual science somehow snuck into more schools. But, guess what? The urge to force one's own beliefs on others can adapt to adverse conditions! In the 1970's, along with movies (it's always movies!) that PROVED Noah's Flood, and therefore all of Genesis, there arose the field of Creation Science. Suddenly one didn't have to throw out science to teach creation, just part of it! The parts that didn't fit Creation. People who previously condemned science now said they had their own new-fangled theory, and therefore it should be taught in schools too. Much litigation and legislation ensued. Creation Science was soundly and roundly shown to be an attempt to teach religious belief as science, and now is mostly extinct.
continued...
Ben Stein is way out of shelf-life. Yet here he is again - one of the gargoyles of the Reagan years, promising to deliver a way out of our confusion, but merely delivering another new dizziness.
This time he's celebrating and selling an erosion of professionalism that usually signals a culture losing it's clarity of being. What are the new standards when News Programs are staffed by carny workers selling glimpses of sideshow freaks - and how could it be otherwise when the ironclad goal is delivering audiences to advertisers - not information to audiences?
Staying rational is hard work. Expelling Ben Stein's ideas is easy as pi.
PT 3--The problem with reinvoking BAD SCIENCE into American science classes again is that it fails to understand the nature of who our future competitors are. The neo-cons and even many others seem to think that th even more backwards thinking Islamic fundamentalists are our only opposition. Currently, militarily yes they are but economically and, more importantly, technologically, the Chinese and Indians are stronger competition. In China over 60% of their college students graduate with a science, mathematics, or engineering degree. In America, that figure is only 30%. You do the math (although most Americans clearly don't want to). We cannot sustain this religious assault on our scientific curriculum and continue to be competitive in the future.
Ben Stein's movie will be a disservice to this country's future ability to compete and will only serve to prop up the bruised pride of religious types who refuse to reconcile their faith with cold hard SCIENTIFIC reality.
pt 2. And this is how scientific funding in schools and the curriculum that was instilled remained until the end of the Cold War. By then, we began to see the backlash. Neo-con Christian parents (who never really liked the idea that l'il Johnny was learning that he was once a monkey) began to attack the scientific curriculum in public schools and trying to impose highly UNSCIENTIFIC philosophies posing as "SCIENTIFIC-based" concepts (with a religious twist) into the teachings. Intelligent Design is one of these bogus philosophies. A concept that suggests that, yes, maybe there was some sort of lengthy evolutionary process at work but that process is aided by the hand of some unseen force. One of the rationales for this philosophy is that there are too many patterns that just "work" for there not to be some sort of outside intervention into the creation of these patterns. Of course, these people won't tell you that the patterns that didn't work (like gigantic reptiles roaming the earth) aren't visible to us nw not because they didn't exist but because they died off because they failed. If there were "failures" (and not that nature ever sees it that way) in the "patterns" than that suggests that, under the theory of ID, God or this outside force got it wrong a hell of a lot more than he got it right. What kind of divine spirit is that?
Since Ben Stein seems to be examining the history of scientific teaching in American schools, he would be wise to explore that history honestly. From the Scopes Monkey trial to the present. One element that often gets overlooked is the important imput from none other than Dwight Eisenhower. Under his administration scientific funding rose dramatically. One of the reasons is that we were slipping in scientific know how to the officially atheistic Soviet children who by the 50's had raised an entire generation of kids who had been taught pure science. The American technological know how (especially as far as the arms race was concerned) was greatly dependent upon the expertise of European scientists (Neils Bohr, Albert Einstein, etc) who often came to America to excape the Nazis. We needed to create future generations of scientists and the only way was to incorporate REAL SCIENTIFIC information in science class.
And as Eisenhower paved he way, Kennedy came around and "tarted science up", as I call it. He used the drive to the moon as an effective tool of capturing the public's imagination about the possibilities of science (especially the imaginations of little children). By the 60's, America had just as many children saying that they want to be astronauts as wanted to be cowboys or cops.
Of course, we all can see the success of the Soviet Union since that generation.
As far as the arms race goes the oviets were successful, too successful. It's everything else that they got wrong. If Eisenhower did not encourage funding when he did, they would have been all too successful with the advancement of their weapon systems. Eisenhower decided to vigorously fund science not for any moral reasons but for very legitimate security reasons. And it worked, too well for the religious types in this country who would rather we live with a scientific know how just above the average Syrian.
Thanks for taking one part of the equation completely out of context. Try to look at the bgger picture or get out the way of those who can.
BTW, I didn't hear Reagan complaining when the rocket scientists of the 80's, who began their earliest scientific endeavors as school children under the Eisenhower administration, complain that there were too many scientifically well-informed Americans to help him amass the number of weapons systems the US amassed under his administration. It would be great to think that American leaders can see science understanding as something greater than a method to create evermore destructive weapons but for those who have a resistant to science in general, it doesn't hurt them to know that there are engineers and scientists around who can help them make big toys that go bang when they need them.
You did notice whose ship the American Space station Astronaut was flying in didn't you?
Or whose ships would be servicing the station when America's shuttles are taken out of service?
Don't denigrate Russian science.
The trailer I saw for the movie says it all. Stein asks a professor who is lecturing on evolution "How did life begin?" or words to that effect. That is the same as saying Maxwell's equiations are invalid as a theoretical descriptoin of electromagnetism becase they don't explain where charge comes from. Evolution describes how life changes over time, not how it arises in the first place.
People of this ilk can't get published in peer reviewed journals because what they are doing is pure bullshit. And demonstrably so. They are trying to force religious doctrine in to the science classroom. I don't see scientists going into churches and critisizing (sp?) their dogma, but I see the reverse of that. Science, when done well, isn't opinion, it's demonstrable facts.
Didn't anyone savor the irony or an intermediate fish/amphibian fossil being discovered during the Dover trial? Oddly enough, Darwin himself was one of the first to predict that such forms would be discovered. One of the hallmarks of a successful theory is that it makes accurate predictions. The theory of Natural Selection has been doing that since the get-go.
And another thing:
Yes, Nazis corrupted Natural Selection into eugenics. Using science in the service of great evil is a time honored tradition. Einstein's relativity theory was used as the basis for nuclear weapons. That does not mean the theory is wrong, it just means that understanding it requires great responsibility.
Or my personal favorite. GRAVITY.
When I asked a friend, who happened to be a world famous mathematicians, how gravity works he told me that I had stubbled on the great question of physics.
Everyone knows that gravity works, but no one know how it works.
He said he had a friend who had a beautifully elegant theory. It concerned gravitrons. The only problem to it was there wasn't a shred of evidence to support it.
So until someone can show me how gravity works I am not going to believe in it. It goes against my religion.
See me fly!
The Nazis just pushed eugenics to its most scary extreme. They did not coin the term nor its concept of helping the "winners" of natura selection overcome the "losers." The term was created by Sir Francis Galton (a cousin of Darwin actually) in 1885. Galton was trying to further the ideas of Herbert Spencer. I don't think Galton ever advocated killing anyone.
The day that you are sucessful in convincing everyone that there is no God, there will be no reason for anyone to follow any of man's laws. If I am held accountable only to others like me, I will revert to a "survival of the fittest" mentality. Civilization will implode. This movie is about the lack of willingness in the science community to even allow me to have my opinion on this if I am a fellow scientist or a teacher. What you are telling the people that attend church in any religion that they are living in a fairy tale and are wasting their time. I wouldn't want to be here when they believe you.
"The day that you are sucessful in convincing everyone that there is no God, there will be no reason for anyone to follow any of man's laws."
Do you really expect anyone to take ya seriously and or trust your ability to reason properly whe you make such fallacious statements?
Good luck with that.
Fairytale, that's one way of putting it. What SCIENTISTS (first) brainwashed HUMANS second (and you seem to be someone who would be described the other way around) are saying is that when you teach children science in a science class then EACH and EVERY item taught ought to be able to stand up to the principles of the scientifc method. And as you are a scientists, I'm sure you know what that is. Conjur a hypothesis, submit said hypothesis to a test with results positted in hypothesis, results should be repeatable. The ONLY loyalty scientists have is to this scientific principle.
If you want to teach creation theory, do so in a mythology class, not science. And while you're teaching the Judeo-Christian version of creation theory also teach the Hindu, Shinto, tribal African, and scientology versions of it, too.
Otherwise, if you want to slap a sticker on the cover of science books that says the theory of evolution is only a theory (as is gravity btw) then let us do the same with each and every Bible: "The items contained within are only a theory."
Don't forget Pasteur's germ theory. There were lots of ppl fighting that for years.
I love this argument, it's so breathlessly, hyperbolically ridiculous. Check your prison populations, 2% atheist. Atheists are way under-represented in prison as a percentage of their membership in the general population. It's ok though, christians pick up the slack for us.
It is religious morality that is false morality; religious morality is predicated on the "do good or be punished" model, which basically means that nobody doing "good" for religious reasons is really acting out of anything but fear of punishment. Fear of reprisal is a weak hold on good behavior, and leads to violent breakdowns when the reprisal system is disabled (see: Katrina, LA Riots, Watts Riots, etc). Being "good" because you don't want to be punished doesn't mean you are a good person; it means you are a bad person who just doesn't want to get caught.
Secular morality is based on reason and the principles of what is best for the community as a whole and, to a lesser extent, the individuals within the community. Man's laws exist to promote the health and well being of the community, and serve to provide a common framework for our behavior and interactions.
Sanity01 wrote:
"The day that you are sucessful in convincing everyone that there is no God, there will be no reason for anyone to follow any of man's laws. If I am held accountable only to others like me, I will revert to a "survival of the fittest" mentality. Civilization will implode."
I'm still laughing. And he has "sanity" in his name. I mean, OK, leave all the arguments for science aside. Forget why people coexist. Can anybody even PICTURE someone convincing all the believers that what they "know" is wrong? Heheheh. Sanity, you can start on the Buddhists. They're "wrong" from your point of view, persuade them otherwise.
This movie isn't about Big Science not allowing him to have his opinion. It's about creating a bad guy that has Science in its name, because the objective evaluation of evidence and ideas doesn't support what he WANTS to believe in.
As for scientists not being allowed to have opinions, well gosh, let's think about this. Science is the pursuit of verifiable, probable truth. The scientific community has a responsibility to specifically disallow anyone from having factually errant opinions, because science deals with reality and reality isn't a matter of opinion. You are entitled to your opinion, but I am not required to respect it or acknowledge it. When your opinion on science is "Everything we can't prove must therefore be magic", you aren't going to get--nor even be entitled to--any respect from the scientific community.
Science like reality has a well known liberal bias.
Didn't Darwin say that he came to his theory of evolution when he realized the immense age of the earth (and it is much older than he thought.)
Then he said something like evolution was needed to explain how life could continue over the vast periods of time. Life cannot be static.
Something I would like to hear the anti-evolutionists explain. And don't give me that 6,000 year old crap. I live in the mountains. Age is obvious here.
Here's the funny part: the Roman Catholic Church seems to accept Darwin these days. They've made their peace and generally accept that the Biblical story of creation is a parable, not to be taken as literally true. It is certain types of evangelicals who cannot accept this and require that 7 days thing to be real and expect us all to believe it because they do.
I freely agree to the concept that living things evolve over time to better fit their surroundings. Those that cannot change fast enough to their habitat fade away and those that can thrive. I think everyone believes that. The only question that I have, that I think has never been answered (very well anyway) is how did the first life start. Not the monkey to human, but where did the first monkey come from. And even more than that, how did the universe form, what caused the Big Bang? Is there an answer out there that shows that life can be created where no life originally existed?
It's an interesting question, but don't look to the answer for that question to have come from a bunch of illiterate superstious nomadic desert dwellers who lived millenium ago to be equipped to have anymore insight into that answer than scientists do today. Remember earnest scientific inquiry, due in large part to impositions placed upon it by the church, is a relatively new phenomenon for humans. Humans making up stories o make them FEEL better is not a new phenomenon.
saltpeter typed:
"It's an interesting question, but don't look to the answer for that question to have come from a bunch of illiterate superstious nomadic desert dwellers who lived millenium ago to be equipped to have anymore insight into that answer than scientists do today."
BWAhahahahah!
HEY! Some of them lived in villages!!
People such as Ben Stein, the unabashed Creationists and the Intelligent Designers are one of the biggest threats that our democracy has ever faced. I support Religious Freedom, in spite of the fact that I do not agree with the majority of what is propagated under that banner, however when these groups overstep the boundaries not only of the Bill of Rights, but of common decency and common sense, there comes a time to say "No more".
These people should be kept out of our public school systems with their foolishness at any cost. It is negligent enough that we allow them to drill their offspring in ignorance by allowing them to be "home schooled". The idea that they have the right to perpetrate a fraud upon innocent children of others is too much for a responsible citizen to bear.
This is an extremely complex problem as school boards are controlled by local voters and Religious Right extremists have become adept at manipulating this system. This is further complicated by Right Wing organizations with no religious motives, such as the Republican Party, which are complicit in pacifying these fanatics as ignorant people are more easily controlled by the government and employers. The costs of combatting such organizations, not only in dollars but in time, are a burden to decent people, however it must be done to preserve our republic.
Eloquently expressed, indeed EDV
Please explain the boundaries of religious feedom as set forth by the Bill of Rights?
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national religion by Congress or the preference of one religion over another, or religion over non-religion
People such as Ben Stein, the unabashed Scientist and the Evolutionist are one of the biggest threats that our democracy has ever faced. I support Scientific Freedom, in spite of the fact that I do not agree with the majority of what is propagated under that banner, however when these groups overstep the boundaries not only of the Bill of Rights, but of common decency and common sense, there comes a time to say "No more".
These people should be kept out of our home school systems with their foolishness at any cost. It is negligent enough that we allow them to drill their offspring in ignorance by allowing them to be "public schooled". The idea that they have the right to perpetrate a fraud upon innocent children of others is too much for a responsible citizen to bear.
This is an extremely complex problem as school boards are controlled by local voters and Commie liberal extremists have become adept at manipulating this system. This is further complicated by Left Wing organizations with religious motives, such as the Democratic Party, which are complicit in pacifying these fanatics as ignorant people are more easily controlled by the government and employers. The costs of combating such organizations, not only in dollars but in time, are a burden to decent people, however it must be done to preserve our republic.
Note changes.
"fearing not id become my enemy in the instance that i ..." bob d
Ben Stein used to a smart and funny guy. Talented too. Then we lost him to the neverland of myth and legend and imaginary friends in the sky. Now he doesn't know science from fairytales! Anybody know what's happened to the mind and the sense of humor and the talent? This is sad.
So should evolution be taught in bible classes?
Yes. And Flying Spaghetti Monsterism should be taught in Home Economics.
;)
They tried that but students kept eating the relics.
I kinda owe Ben Stein, actually... If I hadn't been following discussions of this movie, I might not have heard of the FSM!
That's it! I said aliens but the kid used the Flying Spaghetti Monster as his "alternative" theory to make fun of the ID ppl.
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