Friday, May 2, 2008
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
This week I saw the movie Expelled. Very interesting movie. I was captivated by it. It is a documentary by Ben Stein (Bueller Bueller) about the controversy of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. Apparently some professors have been fired because they mentioned or taught that there was another option in science besides Evolution. I am very interested to hear what others think about this movie. If you have seen it please post a comment. For what it's worth I went with two other guys and they both fell asleep. It may be one that you want to rent on DVD, but if you like documentaries and are interested in this debate then go see it. It is hard to know how I feel about this documentary because my opinions are pretty in line with the film. I would be interested to see what someone who disagrees thinks about it.
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Here's what I didn't like about the movie Rob.
ReplyDelete1. It was boring. I dozed off for at least 10 minutes.
2. It was a propaganda piece for free speech. Which I think is a good thing, but it didn't have to be so obviously propaganda. Trying to make Darwin and all of his amazing scientific advancements out to be the anti-christ is a ridiculous uneducated (and fundamentalist, hey do those go together? ha, I sound like a liberal... I'm not, I'm moderate) thing to do. Plus the movie proposes that Darwin’s theory is the basis for the Holocaust and euthanasia and abortion which is the equivalent to saying that Christianity (the ideas behind it)are to blame for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the genocide of numerous native American tribes, the slave trade and so on. It's the people taking an idea that should mean one thing and completely twisting it. For the record, euthanasia and abortion could be much more readily tied to a Utilitarian Ethical philosophy which was proposed by David Hume who died in 1776. Darwin published the "Origin of Species" in 1859. My point is, things can be twisted and taken out of context to say whatever you want them to say and Darwins thoughts aren't the best fit.
3. Intelligent Design (ID) was ambiguously, at best, presented. I know some fundamentalists (as was presented in the movie) are trying to repackage the creation story as ID. It's not the theory ID is meant to be. ID could in, my opinion, actually go hand in hand with evolution. The difference being that ID says that a "creator" would have had to orchestrate it all and have "designed" life as is evidenced by the complexities of life and the impossibility of chance ever producing life as we know it.
ID could very easily make God and the acceptance and belief in Him a possibility for those who are scientific enough to realize that a "young earth" and non-evolutionary theories don't explain the mountains of evidence to the contrary. The creation story in the Bible doesn't have to be taken literally, perhaps God created the world through the evolutionary process. Just because we can see how it happened, by no means diminishes the awe inspiring work of His creation or the fact that God was behind it all.
That is partially why did not like this movie. Plus I was excited about it because I heard one of the producers doing an interview and I thought it was going to be much more tastefully and thoughtfully presented.