Review of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008) by Nathan M — 16 Nov 2008

An interesting documentary, but suffers from obvious bias. On the one hand, he points out the crimes/deaths out of man-driven implementations of darwin's "natural" selection, but ignores the similar problem with relgious wars.

While he is absolutely correct to point out that there are holes in evolution and that there should be no reason to eliminate inquiry into the notion of whether there is intelligent design or not, he missed two obvious arguments: 1) the fact that religion is not the same a the deity it worships (all religion is interpretation of the diety through the eyes of humans, who have their own biases, etc just as much as scientists may).

2) the argument that science has anything at all to say about the existance or non-existance of God is bogus. Science at the root of its philosophy is designed only to answer "how" not "why".

Scientists who turn to science as an excuse to deny the existance of any diety are no longer treating science as science, but as religion. And this is the fundamental issue, in my mind, in the debate.

It is not science v religion, but yet another religion v religion battle. From a pure science point of view, the question of the origin of life is still very valid and any theory with supporting evidence ought be considered.

To the extent that that was the thesis of this documentary, it was at least somewhat interesting. But I feel it missed the boat if the goal was to open the minds of any ardent-macroevolutionists. It should have done more to separate the arguments around the origin of species and life from the arguments around theism/atheism.

The blurring of those lines is the problem.