Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

"Religulous" was a documentary about the ridiculous aspects of religion. Within the first five minutes we learn that Maher is an atheist, a comedian, and a bit of a prick. In Stein and Frankowski's "Expelled", we begin with black and white montage of The Berlin Wall, armed soldiers and huddled masses, this goes on over the credits for about 5 minutes, while a string version of "All Along The Watchtowers" plays. Then we see Stein behind the stage, an eager roaring crowd waiting for him, as he walks from his dressing room like a heavy weight boxer, and emerges into flashing lights with a greeting of "What up, Gangstas?" So from the word go, we know Stein is going for seriousness, drama, and a tiny bit of levity(not comedy, and certainly not satire as the plot synopsis suggests). We learn nothing about Steins personal views, other than that he is an impartial curious party, interested in defending free speech, wherever he finds it. Maher(who appears in a brief clip here), and Stein both use editing to their advantage, in order to smear, their subjects, but no matter how rude or impish Maher was he's never really dishonest, Stein and co edit quotations of Charles Darwin and Margaret Sanger, to make them into Eugenicists bigots, who all but built the blue prints to Nazi Death camps. Sanger, was a eugenicists but her politics began and ended with giving women birth control and allowing them to make their own decisions. Darwins quote says yes eugenics makes sense, you wouldn't breed inferior animals, etc, but Stein cuts off the next sentence which says, something to the effect that to ignore the weak and helpless, would be to ignore the noblest human virtues, and would be an invitation to great evils.

Richard Dawkins becomes the Darth Vader of the film, mocked in a cartoon, referred to as a reptile, the architect of division, and the climatic end interview pushes past dishonesty to discontinuity. When Stein asks Dawkins if there is any way that Intelligent Design would be possible, Dawkins responds, that if some advanced civilization seeded earth millions of years ago, maybe there could be some molecular signature, but even those advanced creatures would themselves have had to evolve. There the frame freezes, and Stein says "Woah, waoh, waoh, Richard Dawkins believes in Intelligent Design?" This explanation is also called Pansperima which is laughed at earlier in the film as "Darwinists believe in aliens???" There are no interviews with scientists who believe in evolution and religion, according to the film, even if they were to interview them it would be pointless, because they would only just be saying that to save their jobs.

The films charges include, that Darwinism leads to atheism, which leads to moral erosion, which leads to Nazism. The most emotionally manipulative sequence is a tour through a Nazi camp where the handicapped were executed. Darwin also leads to Planned Parenthood and abortion, makes life meaningless, and encourages suicide! While ID, can allow us to discover the existence of God...which will give us the opposite of all that. Societies who worship Gods, will limit themselves in what they will do to other peoples, is another claim. ID is not religious though, and has nothing to do with Creatonism or God. As many of it's proponents say, bringing religion into it is a Darwinist smear campaign to make them seem like fanatics.

There's a Nova documentary called "Intelligent Design On Trial" about the Dover school board case vs. the discovery institute, who was supplying ID books to their schools, school board lawyers won the case when they found early versions of the text books, which had a Freudian slip, and used the word "creationism", where they meant ID...

Very little time is devoted to exploring the cases of any of the scientists fired for their ID convictions. And even less time is given to explaining what advances ID has given science or could lead to. The film focuses mostly on negative proof, the horrors of Darwinism and atheism. And how time and time again, ID proponents are dismissed from their positions, for their controversial views.

I'm prepared to believe that scientists are just as biased as everyone else, if James Watson's comments last year taught us anything it's as much. Maybe Darwin is like Newtonian Physics and one day will discover an Evolutionary equivalent of Einstiens Relativity, but Steins pretentious examination, of an interesting subject, just makes a paranoid, conspiracy ridden mess of things. Its not even remotely funny, and at times downright dishonest. But it is thought provoking in a number ways, like is a movie bad, just because it's wrong? The music and editing was well done. The cartoon where Dawkins, is at the slot machine of life, trying to get all the necessary proteins to create a primordial soup, made me smile a bit. But if you look into any of this films many claims(a 5 to 10 minute goggle search should do it), it falls apart.

To paraphrase a passage from Professor Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker one day a primate woke up and discovered it was self aware . From that moment it started building things and because it was aware of the land , ocean and sky it came to the instant conclusion that these geographical features were also made by someone . On a similar note the oldest established religion in the world Hinduism believes in reincarnation almost certainly down to the fact that nature goes around in cycles such the seasons and the female menstrual cycle hence the believe that lives also go around in cycles . Think too of the forbidden foods in the Abrahamic religions such as pork and seafood . Eating such foods in a hot climate like the Middle East will cause you food poisoning . The ancient Hebrews would misinterpret this as God forbidding certain foodstuffs . You can see the logic and thinking behind these concepts and they do follow a recognisable logic open to interpretation and leads to a belief in creators and afterlives . However just because something is logical doesn't make it true and EXPELLED is not a documentary that concerns itself with truth

This documentary was written by Ben Stein and purports to be about scientists discriminated against by the evolution lobby at American universities . These poor people are critical free thinkers who put forward the suggestion of life on Earth and perhaps the universe itself down to intelligent design

" Whoa Theo . Lay off the big words . what's intelligent design ? "

It's a slightly refined type of creationism

" What's the difference between that and creationism ? " Creationists believe God created all life . Apologists for intelligent design would never use the word " God " have an almost identical train of thought that an intelligence of sort created life . It's like someone saying they're not a believer but they still have a surrogate new age belief along the lines of the Quakers or Bhuddhists

It turns out that if you do a quick internet search of these " intelligent design martyrs " then you'll find that there's much more to it than Stein's comments that they were victimised simply for not following the evolution crowd . Don't believe me ? Then look it up for yourself

Stein you see wants us all to believe that there's a massive conspiracy against anyone having a different opinion to the Darwinian crowd and he never misses a chance to compare it to the oppressive communist regimes of Eastern Europe . The irony of that is communist nations did away with genetics and replaced it with the pseudoscience of Lysenkoism because it was more in keeping with the Marxist doctrine of conditioning . That and the fact genetics was seen as being a reactionary concept used only by fascists

And this is where EXPELLED really scores an own goal . Despite painting scientists who believe in evolution as being on a par with Stalin he has to bring up the Nazis who were Darwinian dogmatists and that's why they murdered millions because they were replacing God with Darwin . Two facts you might want to consider here

1 ) Hitler never mentions the name Charles Darwin in Mein Kampf

2 ) Not one single Nazi leader was an atheist . All of them were brought either Catholic or Protestant . Christianity was not banned under the Nazi regime and was encouraged even though Nazi society did tend to mirror a sort of neo-Hindu paganism rather than the happy clappy vicar we are used to in 21st Century Europe . You might like to remember the Hitler oath taken by all military personnel in the Wehrmacht starts with " I swear by God this sacred oath that to the leader of the German empire ..... "

So you see there's a laughable irony to all this nonsense being put forward by Stein which does leave a nasty taste in the mouth . That said anyone with any intelligence can see through this tissue of lies and you come away with a feeling of both intellectual and moral superiority to Stein and his ID cohorts , so much so I could have given this 10/10 even though it deserves 1/10 so I'll compromise and give it 5/10

Intelligent Design has no evidence to support it (everything they claim has been refuted, look for yourself) and states that life has a supernatural origin. This is creationism not science. Once you realise that then everything else in the film is irrelevant. Worse than that it's so utterly biased.

Arguments for evolution and the events surrounding these arguments are mentioned then dismissed with a single comment and a pointless piece of archive footage. This footage has nothing to do with the point in question and is only there to try and ridicule opposing views.

I have followed much of the ID story for years and so much is brushed aside in this film (I refuse to call it a documentary), so much is deliberately taken out of context that this travesty can only be described as blatant propaganda.

The worst thing in this film is the way they try and blame Darwin for the holocaust, this is like trying to blame the person who discovered fire for the witch burning during the inquisition.

I do recommend that you watch this film as it gives a good insight into the methods and motivations of the ID proponents and exposes them as nothing more than sick twisted liars.

For those who have found positive things to say about this film, I would ask you how the greatest conspiracy in human history might have been perpetrated. Virtually every major scientific society in the world has come out with the strongest support for evolution, a theory that has more factual underpinnings than the atomic theory of matter or quantum mechanics. The conspiracy to silence the dissent against evolution must include most people working in geology, biochemistry, paleontology, ecology, molecular genetics, etc., all fields where overwhelming amounts of evidence provide the basis for our understanding of how life on earth diverged from a common origin. When I am told that "leading" scientists have questioned evolution, it reminds me of the National Enquirer headline that stated that a space scientist had an encounter with aliens. Reading the article made it clear that this person was a draftsman at some NASA facility. Let us be clear that there is no scientific debate about whether evolution took place (that debate was finished more than 100 years ago), rather, it is religious fundamentalism that refuses to accept that humans evolved from other life forms (yet most Americans do not accept this fact). Ben Stein's agenda appears to be to drive America back to some fundamentalist time, while the rest of the world advances.

Among this films multitude of sins you can count quote mining (contorting information from even Darwin himself), the blatant misrepresentation of it's supposed subject matter, evolution (which has nothing to say about the origin of life), and the offensive suggestion that being an atheist denotes a lack of morality to the extent that we all harbour genocidal tendencies.

Amazingly, the film doesn't even bother to define what the terms 'Intelligent Design' (read: 'God Did It') or 'Darwinism' mean, most likely to deliberately muddy the waters and reframe the discussion as one of free speech rather than evidence vs. magic. In terms of propaganda, this was probably a shrewd move on the part of the filmmakers because if they did actually shed any factual light on the precepts of ID it would disintegrate like a vampire. To set the record straight the term 'Darwinist' is redundant. There is only the theory of evolution. It is not a cult of personality but rather a hard-studied scientific construct supported by the work of thousands of scientists over hundreds of years. Furthermore, it is a bit rich to make an emotive plea for free speech in terms of a 'level playing field' considering that religion has a less than stellar history in such matters. In science if you can't back up what you have to say with evidence then it is of no use to the system. This uselessness is unintentionally (and ironically) embodied in Expelled as it is thick on rhetoric and wafer thin in terms of actual substance.

Plagued by dishonesty and misinformation throughout this film lacks the very moral values of transparency and fairness it claims to promote (for examples check out the trivia on IMDb.com). As well as being hypocritical it is also kind of cowardly. If you are going to make a documentary on this stuff at least have the integrity to say what you actually believe in instead of obfuscating the issues at hand and, frankly, lying. People deserve better which is precisely why rationalists balk at the idea of letting these folks loose in the science classroom. Overall, having set the bar so low, I would say that Expelled deserves to be looked back on by future generations and ridiculed and puzzled over in equal measure. 'Did people really think like that?' I am afraid so.