Has anyone seen the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" ?

countryboy · Apr 18, 2008

Has anyone seen the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" ? www.expelledthemovie.com
does it get on your nerves, or it makes prefect senses to yee.

to me:
Ben Stein’s docudrama "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is another anti-science propaganda attempt to get on my nerves. Intelligent Design is NOT a scientific theory; it is only a religion in disguise. Intelligent Design is based on "Since I do not know how to explain X - then God must have done it."

Calling intelligent design 'science' is sufficient to demonstrate that intelligent design theorists do not understand what science is, in the same way that calling "a deer as a horse" is sufficient to show that the speaker does not understand biology.
"Intelligent design tells us nothing that we can use to better understand and cure cancer or Parkinson's disease. There is nothing it can tell us that can lead to the discovery of a way of preventing malaria that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. It will not provide us with food sources that can survive droughts to that people in arid parts of the world can feed themselves. It says nothing at all useful in determining the effects of different chemicals that we are putting in our air, our water, and our food to tell us whether they are poisonous or beneficial. It tells us none of the things that science tells us - things that protects our lives, health, and well-being." as Alonzo Fyfe put it.

Creationists,

Next time you, or a loved one suffers a heart attack, don't call 911. Have faith, pray. Why get those dirty doctors involved with their dirty science, and proven methods of saving lives based on sound principles and research? Why accept treatment based on evidence and results? Clearly, you should give equal time to the faith-healer, and witchdoctor. Who are we to deny your rights?

master_g · Apr 18, 2008

^ lol we believe God gave man the wisdom to become doctors etc for everyones benefit, are you assuming that we believe all doctors and the like come from the devil or something ROFL. a person who is ill and doesn't use the resources available is rather silly.

your saying they made the movie to get on YOUR nerves, LOL who do you think you are, you drama queen.

I dont see why people like you cant separate the 'Theory' of an ever existing singularity resulting in a dark primordial soup giving birth to some form of goo, from medical science which is proven lolz. also show me the medications and cures that come about as a by-product of believing in Evolution... this is dumb

Next time you find yourself in a life or death situation dont go using the 'God if you save me ill serve you' routine hahaha

P.S im in the UK so i dont dial 911....

lolz im finding it hard to take you seriously.... so i wont

countryboy said: ↑

Who are we to deny your rights?
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If you practised what you just preached you wouldn't have even written your silly rant, i guess you wrote the above in an attempt to sound good? fill in extra space?

as i said, i cant take you seriously.

hiake · May 13, 2008

@OP: I am DYING to see Expelled, very compelling documentary (or shall I say, "mockumentary"?), given the amount of coverage Scientific American is giving it (generous, to say the least). Ben Stein just gave a bad name to ALL documentary filmmakers out there by lying and deceiving scientists and editing soundbits so that it sounded as if they are anything but ambivalent to Intelligent Design. And Ben Stein dared to hold a private screening to the editors of SciAm, the nerves!

Anyways.

I would expect the documentary to get on my nerves, as any kind of blatant propaganda with heavily edited soundbits would. And the film hold little to no honest truth as the "alienated" scientists who are religiously affiliated, who Ben Stein claimed to be discriminated and prosecuted against, were merely finishing their contract without a renewal. Hah!

The worst thing about Expelled is not Ben Stein's stance towards evolution and intelligent design, or heaven forbid, CREATIONISM; it is the fact that it is made of a colourful array of shameless lies and call itself documentary. Next thing you know, there will be a propaganda with a walking beard man claiming to be some God, posing as a documentary of this God-like being's never-ending life. Wait, it's already been made hadn't it?

I need not see the film to know the jist of it... with descriptive references from SciAm, I wouldn't have a second thought about the integrity (or the lack of) of this film.

Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...
...about intelligent design and evolution

By John Rennie and Steve Mirsky

In the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, narrator Ben Stein poses as a "rebel" willing to stand up to the scientific establishment in defense of freedom and honest, open discussion of controversial ideas like intelligent design (ID). But Expelled has some problems of its own with honest, open presentations of the facts about evolution, ID—and with its own agenda. Here are a few examples—add your own with a comment, and we may add it to another draft of this story. For our complete coverage, see "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed—Scientific American's Take.

1) Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust.

When the film is building its case that Darwin and the theory of evolution bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, Ben Stein's narration quotes from Darwin's The Descent of Man thusly:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

This is how the original passage in The Descent of Man reads (unquoted sections emphasized in italics):

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The producers of the film did not mention the very next sentences in the book (emphasis added in italics):

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.

Darwin explicitly rejected the idea of eliminating the "weak" as dehumanizing and evil. Those words falsify Expelled's argument. The filmmakers had to be aware of the full Darwin passage, but they chose to quote only the sections that suited their purposes.

2) Ben Stein's speech to a crowded auditorium in the film was a setup.

"Viewers of Expelled might think that Ben Stein has been giving speeches on college campuses and at other public venues in support of ID and against "big science." But if he has, the producers did not include one. The speech shown at the beginning and end was staged solely for the sake of the movie. Michael Shermer learned as much by speaking to officials at Pepperdine University, where those scenes were filmed. Only a few of the audience members were students; most were extras brought in by the producers. Judge the ovation Ben Stein receives accordingly.

3) Scientists in the film thought they were being interviewed for a different movie.

As Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer and other proponents of evolution appearing in Expelled have publicly remarked, the producers first arranged to interview them for a film that was to be called Crossroads, which was allegedly a documentary on "the intersection of science and religion." They were subsequently surprised to learn that they were appearing in Expelled, which "exposes the widespread persecution of scientists and educators who are pursuing legitimate, opposing scientific views to the reigning orthodoxy," to quote from the film's press kit.

When exactly did Crossroads become Expelled? The producers have said that the shift in the film's title and message occurred after the interviews with the scientists, as the accumulating evidence gradually persuaded them that ID believers were oppressed. Yet as blogger Wesley Elsberry discovered when he searched domain registrations, the producers registered the URL "expelledthemovie.com" on March 1, 2007—more than a month (and in some cases, several months) before the scientists were interviewed. The producers never registered the URL "crossroadsthemovie.com". Those facts raise doubt that Crossroads was still the working title for the movie when the scientists were interviewed.

4) The ID-sympathetic researcher whom the film paints as having lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution was never an employee there.

One section of Expelled relates the case of Richard Sternberg, who was a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. According to the film, after Sternberg approved the publication of a pro-ID paper by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute, he lost his editorship, was demoted at the Smithsonian, was moved to a more remote office, and suffered other professional setbacks. The film mentions a 2006 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report prepared for Rep. Mark Souder (R–Ind.), "Intolerance and the Politicization of Science at the Smithsonian," that denounced Sternberg's mistreatment.

This selective retelling of the Sternberg affair omits details that are awkward for the movie's case, however. Sternberg was never an employee of the Smithsonian: his term as a research associate always had a limited duration, and when it ended he was offered a new position as a research collaborator. As editor, Sternberg's decision to "peer-review" and approve Meyer's paper by himself was highly questionable on several grounds, which was why the scientific society that published the journal later repudiated it. Sternberg had always been planning to step down as the journal's editor—the issue in which he published the paper was already scheduled to be his last.

The report prepared by Rep. Souder, who had previously expressed pro-ID views, was never officially accepted into the Congressional Record. Notwithstanding the report's conclusions, its appendix contains copies of e-mails and other documents in which Sternberg's superiors and others specifically argued against penalizing him for his ID views. (More detailed descriptions of the Sternberg case can be found on Ed Brayton's blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars and on Wikipedia.)

5) Science does not reject religious or "design-based" explanations because of dogmatic atheism.

Expelled frequently repeats that design-based explanations (not to mention religious ones) are "forbidden" by "big science." It never explains why, however. Evolution and the rest of "big science" are just described as having an atheistic preference.

Actually, science avoids design explanations for natural phenomena out of logical necessity. The scientific method involves rigorously observing and experimenting on the material world. It accepts as evidence only what can be measured or otherwise empirically validated (a requirement called methodological naturalism). That requirement prevents scientific theories from becoming untestable and overcomplicated.

By those standards, design-based explanations rapidly lose their rigor without independent scientific proof that validates and defines the nature of the designer. Without it, design-based explanations rapidly become unhelpful and tautological: "This looks like it was designed, so there must be a designer; we know there is a designer because this looks designed."

A major scientific problem with proposed ID explanations for life is that their proponents cannot suggest any good way to disprove them. ID "theories" are so vague that even if specific explanations are disproved, believers can simply search for new signs of design. Consequently, investigators do not generally consider ID to be a productive or useful approach to science.

6) Many evolutionary biologists are religious and many religious people accept evolution.

Expelled includes many clips of scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, William Provine and PZ Myers who are also well known as atheists. They talk about how their knowledge of science confirms their convictions and how in some cases science led them to atheism. And indeed, surveys do indicate that atheism is more common among scientists than in the general population.

Nevertheless, the film is wrong to imply that understanding of evolution inevitably or necessarily leads to a rejection of religious belief. Francisco Ayala of the University of California, Irvine, a leading neuroscientist who used to be a Dominican priest, continues to be a devout Catholic, as does the evolutionary biologist Ken Miller of Brown University. Thousands of other biologists across the U.S. who all know evolution to be true are also still religious. Moreover, billions of other people around the world simultaneously accept evolution and keep faith with their religion. The late Pope John Paul II said that evolution was compatible with Roman Catholicism as an explanation for mankind's physical origins.

During Scientific American's post-screening conversation with Expelled associate producer Mark Mathis, we asked him why Ken Miller was not included in the film. Mathis explained that his presence would have "confused" viewers. But the reality is that showing Miller would have invalidated the film's major premise that evolutionary biologists all reject God.

Inside and outside the scientific community, people will no doubt continue to debate rationalism and religion and disagree about who has the better part of that argument. Evidence from evolution will probably remain at most a small part of that conflict, however.

Source: SciAm
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SciAm was so generous that they have a SPECIAL on Expelled Here

So yeah, Expelled = no integrity.

Dan · May 13, 2008

hi hiake. lol

Has anyone seen the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" ?

countryboy Well-Known Member

master_g .

hiake Vardøgr of da E.Twin

Dan 8-D