I have not seen Expelled, the documentary movie featuring Ben Stein, currently showing in theaters. I have read some reviews of it. Two reviews by Christians seem to be especially thorough.
The title of the movie suggests its purpose, namely to prove that the concept of Intelligent Design has been unfairly excluded from schools and academic discussion.
Higgaion and He Lives, in their reviews, agree on the following:
The Intelligent Design movement is not scientific, in spite of the movie. It has not been clearly defined, and has presented no experiments testing its basic premise.
The common claim, by the Intelligent Design movement, that ID is not religious in nature, is clearly refuted by the movie. (This claim is made to bolster the claim that ID has a place in public school science classes.) It is religious.
Intelligent Design has not been unfairly excluded from academia.
Higgaion refutes the claim, made in the movie, that Darwin's ideas led to Nazism. (I confess -- I used to claim that myself, years and years ago.)
He Lives (whose author is a physicist) concludes that many Christians, upon watching the movie (which seems to have been mostly marketed to Christians) will conclude that science is an enemy of the faith. It isn't.
Thanks for reading.
Musings on science, the Bible, and fantastic literature (and sometimes basketball and other stuff).
God speaks to us through the Bible and the findings of science, and we should listen to both types of revelation.
The title is from Psalm 84:11.
The Wikipedia is usually a pretty good reference. I mostly use the World English Bible (WEB), because it is public domain. I am grateful.
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The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.
9 comments:
It is nice to see that there are some level-headed Christians out there who were not fooled by this fraud of a movie.
For more in-depth coverage of this move, the site at:
http://www.expelledexposed.com/ has a wealth of information about everybody who is featured in the movie and what really happened to the so-called persecuted scientists.
I haven't seen the movie myself, and probably won't. IF it did claim that Darwin's ideas LED to Nazism, then it is indeed wrong. However, Darwin's ideas probably did reach and influence Hitler in some manner, although not to the degree some people would wish.
This movie would have been better dealt with by the Darwinists by simply ignoring it. Face it, we're not talking summer blockbuster here!
Thanks, gentlemen.
Actually, I understand that this movie is doing fairly well at the box office.
Go see it. I think you will enjoy the delivery, which includes humor, and find there are a few morsels worth chewing on. :-) While I probably won't buy the dvd, I enjoyed seeing it in the theater. Along with many other interesting comments by seemingly noteworthy professionals, Dawkins comments fascinating. Does he speculate that whatever initiated the first cell was a highly evolved being? Interesting...
Sara K
Interesting point. I look forward to seeing this documentary. Leave it to Ben Stein to do the interesting.
Thanks for the comments.
I do watch Stein as a CBS commentator, and he is interesting.
Dawkins' comments were interesting. I have read about them. I also read that, while a known critic of Intelligent Design was excluded from an early showing of the movie, Dawkins, who is a flaming radical atheist critic of ID, was not. (The excluder didn't recognize him.)
It is also apparently unfortunate that some scientists with moderate views (Francis Collins, for example, who is head of the Human Genome project, and a Christian) were not used in the movie.
Thanks again. I may see it.
Slightly off-topic, but here is a humorous video allegedly related to the movie: Richard Dawkins rapping. (The follow-up video credits it to the Expelled Team.)
Ben Stein is a smart, funny man.
Most people have made up their minds about this issue, have they not?
April 27: Oh, the things you find on YouTube! Thanks, Tap.
I think you are right, Julana.
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