Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

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.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS: This film for me sums up the mentality of people like Ben Stein and the Christian Right: The Ends Justify The Means. Which is ironic, considering they have the nerve to show evolutionists intercut with Nazi death camps! Dishonesty, half-hidden false accusations, unfair comparisons, it's all fair game to the Christian filmmakers.

If there is someone who is more grating or unctuous in his insincere sincerity than Ben Stein, I don't know who it is. The only way I could watch this movie is to watch it as a comedy. Otherwise, if you are given to occasional rational thought, it will make your head explode. It expects you to take faith-based attacks against rationality as rational thinking. Its cartoon of how a cell works reveals more about the mentality of the filmmakers than I think they are aware.

The funniest thing about this film is its rating, which presently is 3.8. I went to the "loved it" section to see who rated it highly. Not surprisingly, it was given ten stars by a number of people whose reviews were suspiciously similar. Hmm... They wouldn't be doing something dishonest to help the cause of religion (I mean, Intelligent Design), would they? Without all of these attempts to jack up the rating for this film, it might actually reach the number 1 bottom position, beating out Battlefield Earth, Santa With Muscles, and Manos: The Hands of Fate.

They didn't help the cause of religion (at least as a positive force), and they certainly didn't help the cause of any benevolent God, with this "documentary".

"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.

I don't know if this movie could even be considered a legitimate documentary. The movie is filmed with interjected scenes of Nazi war camps while the interviews are taking place. Apparently Ben Stein blames the holocaust on science and uses this to support his view against evolution. The entire "documentary" is misleading, he rarely shows any subtext of who he is talking to or make mention of any of their accreditation. Ignoring this, Ben never actually makes any real scientific points at all during the entire film. He never even stumps or even makes it appear that he has stumped a scientists anywhere in this film.

Apparently, Mr. Stein's entire objective of this film is to convey no real science (not there there is any in ID to begin with) but rather to preach out about free speech and how we should "teach the controversy". However, there is no real controversy, the "controversy" was already sorted out decades ago. I guess this means we should teach alchemy AFTER the discovery of chemistry because some backwards, ignorant, bronze age people from a time capsule still think alchemy is viable science.

Creationism's explanation for the unexplained is that of supernatural. However, by definition supernatural is unknown. So what the film is really saying is: we cannot explain X with current knowledge, therefore, X = supernatural = unknown (why is there a middle term there?). Just because theory A may not explain X does not mean that theory B automatically explains X.

Disregarding everything that I have mentioned above, the movie is still directed poorly, uses cheesy clips and doesn't flow well.

It is a terrible and misleading movie.