“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”: A Review

I went and saw this movie with a couple teachers and a few of my classmates yesterday. When I first heard about the movie I thought it was pretty stellar that an anti-evolution movie was even going to make it to theaters; and if Ben Stein is the one behind it, then of course it’s going to happen. Before I watched the movie, however, I heard that it had gotten rotten reviews on rotten tomatoes; out of 30 reviews, it got a 10% rating.

Reviewer Steven Hyden said this: “Expelled is a classic bait-and-switch, presenting itself as a plea for freedom in the scientific marketplace of ideas, while actually delivering a grossly unfair, contradictory, and ultimately repugnant attack on Darwinists, whose theory of life is first described, in frustratingly vague terms, as “unintelligible” and “a room full of smoke,” then as a pathway to atheism, and finally as a Nazi justification for the Holocaust.” All the other reviews I skimmed on the site were similar.

But I watched the movie, and although I found it incredibly dramatized, and the Hitler connection was a bit difficult to appreciate, I did find some valuable things in it. It should be acknowledged that regardless of whether you believe in evolution or creationism (or intelligent design– some ID people did NOT want to be associated with creationism), it is a belief based on faith and uncertainty. This is a question of a religious nature, whether the religion is Christianity/Judaism or Science. His interview with Richard Dawkins was quite poignant. So was the hopeless rantings of an atheist professor from Cornell, who quite forcefully said ID was just plain “boring,” and then went on later to deconstruct any possible morality or meaning from life, and said clearly that if his brain tumor returned, he would blow his brains out before dying horribly. Didn’t matter, anyway.

The movie mentions at one point how we are ultimately shaped by our worldviews. Although that is a cultural “buzzword” right now (and was exploited as such in the movie), it has an element of truth to it. I do not think that movie had the proper rhetoric to persuade anyone to change how they viewed this issue; for those who already believe in ID they will be righteously reinforced in that belief, and for those who are atheists and/or evolutionists, this is just a laughable farce. “”There is no way to bypass the filter of one’s own perceptions,” as my friend Seth put extremely well.

Seth then directed me to a quote from The Fairly Oddparents. “In an infinite universe where reality is interpreted through our continually fluctuating perceptions, providing absolute definitive proof of any objective truth becomes little more than speculation based on random data.”