Review of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008) by Mark H — 24 Nov 2008

Ben Stein equates himself to Ronald Reagan and the fight for the freedom to explore ID to tearing down the Berlin Wall. Whereas Religulous is funny with lots of colorful clips inserted to make fun of the ideas, this movie has almost exclusively used old black and white clips, many from propaganda films, to try to makes its point.

The movie offers no data or proof of ID (or how it is really not the same as Creationism) from any research. And it exaggerates how scientists have lost their jobs specifically for trying to research ID.

The movie is arguing against Darwin's theory of evolution and then tries to attack it as insufficient for explaining how life began. Except Darwin's theory isn't about how life began, scientists have been working on many other theories for how this happened.

Ben Stein and the filmmakers only let the evolutionists express a couple of the theories that have been developed for how the first cells formed, and at times try to put words in their mouths. It's not mentioned in the film, but maybe you've heard of the Collider the European Center for Nuclear Research has built in Geneva to recreate the big bang.

Then the filmmakers start to make the dangerous and ignorant claim that Social Darwinism or any genocide that has been committed against a people is because of the theory of evolution. Evil, crazy, power-hungry rulers whether religious or secular have had the idea of genocide and used it against those they view as inferior long before Darwin.

Germany was a very Christian nation when Hitler came to power, not all god-less and de-valuing of human life. One evolutionary scientist seems overly depressed and cynical and makes some ridiculous claims like once you accept evolution you can't believe in free will anymore either.

Other than him, I think all the other evolutionary scientists succeed in holding their own and making Stein look slow and confused. The ID scientists often make extreme claims and engage in double-talk.

Anyways, this is yet another documentary on a controversial topic that had to rely on misrepresenting itself to several interviewees to secure interviews. You can tell Richard Dawkins near the end becomes annoyed when he realizes the direction Stein is trying to take the questioning.

But he still answers as clearly as possible when not cut off. He even states, when prompted by Stein, that one theory for the forming of the first life, is that there could be some sort of intelligence that pushed the molecules into the right amino acids to form proteins to build the first cells.

He doesn't say the evidence supports this, but that it is one of many theories about this (not to be confused with Darwinism). Science is not the democratic equal expression of opinions, it is based on data and evidence.

There is freedom to research scientifically and this movie is too harsh in portraying ID and evolution as being at war or on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall.