Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
January 31, 2008
On one of my frequent late night trawls on the internet I dredged up this piece of ignorant, misleading and patronising creationist (or ‘intelligent design’) propaganda. The film is going to be released in the United States in early February, and features contributions from a number of eminent intellectuals, including Dawkins, Dennett, and Phillip Pettit. It seems that the makers duped all of them into appearing in the film by intentionally misrepresenting its content and stance. Another Darwinian contributor, “PZ” Myers, has published the invitation he received to appear in Expelled; you can find it here. Not only does the letter give a different title for the film (Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion), but the original blurb about it on the Rampant Films website includes the claim that “Darwin provided the answer” to the question of how we exist. If this isn’t intentional mispresentation of the film’s stance and content, I don’t know what is.
What’s even more sickening is that a concerted campaign is underway to get Expelled shown to schoolchildren across the States. If schools and colleges arrange trips to see the film they will receive generous ‘donations’ of up to $10 000, the exact amount depending on how many students watch it. This information, taken from the ‘Get Expelled Challenge’ web site, is published on Richard Dawkins’s web site, and you can see it for yourself by following this link. I love the fact that there is actually a specified ‘donation structure’, detailing precisely how much your college will receive if X amount of kids see Expelled.
The sad fact is that creationists are not the underdogs in the United States. In a 2004 poll, 55% of Americans said that they believed that human beings were created directly by God; just 13% said that human beings evolved with no divine involvement whatsoever. Demonstrating the political aspect of the evolution vs. creationism debate, 67% of those who said that human beings were directly created by God voted for Bush in the last presidential election.
Expelled is made by rich and powerful ideologues prepared to lie and bribe in order to promote their right wing politics and their fundamentalist religious beliefs.
On a lighter note, I found this hilarious (and slightly disturbing) video on Youtube. Enjoy…
February 7, 2008 at 2:37 am
I completely agree with you that this anti-scientific rubbish should be kept out of schools etc.
But, surely when comparing the number of American’s who believe that human beings were created by God with the number of American’s who don’t believe such silliness, the right statistic to compare it to is not that “13% said that human beings evolved with no divine involvement whatsoever”, but that “X% believe that evolution is true” (which does not entail that there is no room for God). It seems odd to premise atheism as the natural alternative to creationism – a view that I think reinforces the crude dichotomy that creationists pose – evolution or religion.
February 8, 2008 at 12:28 am
I agree with you to some extent. Christian fundamentalists do back up their beliefs by drawing false dichotomies. So, for example, you’re told that you either believe that
- there’s no God;
- we evolved from ‘mud’ and ‘lightning’;
- free will is an illusion;
- morality is bunk;
- life has no meaning (etc);
or you believe that
- God exists;
- he created us;
- he endowed us with free will;
- morality is God’s word;
- life is meaningful (etc).
Since the former bundle of claims are so intolerable, the latter must be true. This inference, of course, rests on the false and childish assumption that reality must be how I want it to be. But it also rests on a very crude, erroneous dichotomy, because there’s miles of middle ground.
You raise the more specific point that one can consistently believe in God and evolution. I don’t deny that this is so, but I think that the two claims are in significantly greater tension than many theists think. Suppose that God did set up the initial conditions for evolution to occur, and foresaw its ultimate product (i.e. us in Christianity’s anthropocentric world view). Perhaps he even ‘nudged’ it occasionally, causing a mutation here and there to help natural selection on its way. By all accounts, evolution is a nasty way to make stuff: lots of suffering due to constant competition, survival of the fittest, slaughter of the weak, etc. Most mutations bring disadvantages, so for every mutation that increases survival value, there are many which confer a disadvantage. Juxtapose:
- God is all-loving, omniscient and omnipotent
with
- God chose to create living things through a process that involved millions of years of intense competition and suffering.
It seems to me that evolution makes the problem of evil more intractable than ever, thus placing it in some tension with theism.
That said, many Christians do believe in evolution. ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways’ gets one out of many a paradox…