Comfort, Cameron, Stein and critics all indulging in revisionist history
As Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort continue their campaign to distribute copies of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species with a specially-written introduction, many of those who are concerned about their campaign are still struggling to formulate a fitting response.
Randy Olson seems to have predicted that particular response.
Well, maybe predict isn't the right word. As Olson notes, the response to the kind of ideas proposed in Comfort's introduction -- blaming Darwin's theory for the Holocaust and for the Eugenics program carried out by Nazi Germany -- has been seen before.
It was seen throughout 2008, as critics vented their spleen at Ben Stein's Expelled.
"Both Stein and Cameron invoke the dishonest and inaccurate suggestion that Darwin inspired Hitler," Olson writes. "Both are celebrities playing the lead role for the anti-evolution forces. And both will elicit the same response from the world of science: thousands of furious, hateful comments on the science blogs crying foul -- and in both cases, all that ranting and rage won’t compete with the anti-evolution messaging."
There's a reason why all that ranting and rage won't compete with the "anti-evolution messaging".
It's because in this case, the anti-evolution messaging is true. Or, rather, half-true.
Individuals like Olson seem to be operating under a wishful delusion. They insist that Darwin's theories didn't inspire Adolph Hitler to lead Nazi Germany in the planning and execution of its atrocities. Oddly enough, their insistences are also half-true.
But history rarely copes well with half-truths. Wherever someone chooses to tell only half of any story, the other half forever remains to put the lie to the conclusions these individuals draw.
Olson -- and a great many other commentators omitting fully half the story -- choose to overlook the fact that Darwin's theories weren't only central to Hitler's atrocities, but central to the very idea of eugenics as a whole.
The problem for these arguments -- as forwarded by Cameron, Comfort and Stein, among others -- is that these programs have always been based on a very selective reading of Darwin's work. These selective readings often omit entire sentences from within the passages they use to justify their plans. In other cases, they're based on wishful and self-serving interpretations of what is actually there.
What is quickly emerging is one of the more insidious elements of many modern debates: history is being subverted for the purpose of rhetoric, with competing revisionist histories -- each predicated on half-truths -- vying for dominance.
It's becoming clear that the appropriate response to the efforts of individuals like Cameron, Comfort and Stein may not come from the scientific community. Rather, the appropriate response will ahve to come from those who are willing to embrace all the facts surrounding this controversy, and present history as it actually happened, not as either side wishes it did.
The ongoing debate between the pro-evolution and anti-evolution camps is simply not worth suberting history for.
Showing posts with label Ben Stein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ben Stein. Show all posts
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Thanks For Calling, Guys
Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Ben Stein sent packing by Academy Awards
When the Best Documentary Film Oscar is handed out at the 2009 Academy Awards, the producers of Expelled, Religulous and Slacker Uprising will not be accepting the award.
The omission of Ben Stein, Bill Maher and Michael Moore off the 15-film roll call of Oscar nominees, probably represents one of two things: either the less-than-spectacular stature of each of these films, or a rejection of a growing scourge in the genre of documentary film: the documentary style often referred to as Michael Moore-ism.
Films made in the Michael Mooreist style tend to be sensational and ultimately self-promoting; long on rhetoric and short on actual facts. The editing is usually cartoonish, relying on inter-cut clips of cartoon shows or amusing archive footage, often inserted into the film on a random cue -- what Richard Dawkins describes as a "lord privy seal" in his less-than-sparkling criticism of the film.
(Interestingly, Bill Maher's pro-atheist Expelled contained a great many such "lord privy seals" -- something that Dawkins declined to criticize. Commentators on Dawkins blog even went to great lengths to defend Maher's indulgences, which really only reinforces the known hypocrisy of many Dawkinites.)
Sometimes, the questions asked by such films are, in and of themselves, quite valid: Expelled, for example, calls into question the level of academic freedom at many institutions of higher learning, and Religulous questions many of the excesses of the religious faithful. Bowling for Columbine raised important questions about American gun culture, and about the effect organizations such as the NRA have on American society.
In the end, however, each film is ultimately self-promoting. Ben Stein clearly intends to elevate to heroic status among the community of religious believers -- or at least amongst those who believe in Intelligent Design theory. Bill Maher clearly wants to ascend to Dawkins-like status in terms of being a religion fighter. Slacker Uprising turned out to be nothing more than shameless self-promotion on Michael Moore's part, offering little more than a showcase of Moore speaking to large anti-Bush rallies and hobnobbing with like-minded celebrity buddies during the 2004 election.
Rarely has anyone gone to the lengths Moore has gone to in order to promote himself as a hero of the American left -- or, some would say, the global left, as the distinction between the two so often proves to be rather slim.
Films made in the Michael Mooreist style often feature one highly unethical feature: that of the late-film ambush, where an unsuspecting subject is lured into a compromising interview with a surprise interviewer.
Bill Maher lied to many subjects of Religulous in order to get them to appear, and later shamelessly admitted it. Richard Dawkins accused Ben Stein of lying in order to get him to appear in Expelled (but remained oddly silent when Maher admitted to lying in order to lure many of Religulous' subjects into interviews).
In each case, however, it could be argued that lying was the only way to draw these individuals into the richly-deserved limelight of ridicule. Few have parlayed outright arrogance into star status as effectively as Dawkins. And, quite frankly, anybody who has the audacity to claim to be the second coming of Jesus Christ deserves to be forced to defend that assertion in the public eye.
At base level, Moore's ambush of Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine seems to fit the same bill. Yet, as it turned out, Heston was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease during the time of the interview. While Heston certainly deserved to be called to account for his callous response to several shooting incidents, what eventually emerged was a failure of human compassion: the badgering of a man at the beginning of a slow, agonizing process of dying.
Perhaps moreso than Farenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine provided the model for the explosion of Michael Mooreist films in the succeeding years. That it won an Oscar and provided its maker with a nearly unprecedented stage from which to pronounce his political views only encouraged the proliferation of such films.
Which makes it perhaps fitting that the pale imitations of this film -- including Moore's own pale imitation -- will likely continue to be snubbed by the Academy.
But one way or the other, so long as self-promoting unethical hacks continue to look at documentary film as a venue through which they can lionize themselves, the Michael Mooreist style isn't going away.
At least now the Academy is set to stop pretending it represents any form of excellence -- technical or otherwise.
When the Best Documentary Film Oscar is handed out at the 2009 Academy Awards, the producers of Expelled, Religulous and Slacker Uprising will not be accepting the award.
The omission of Ben Stein, Bill Maher and Michael Moore off the 15-film roll call of Oscar nominees, probably represents one of two things: either the less-than-spectacular stature of each of these films, or a rejection of a growing scourge in the genre of documentary film: the documentary style often referred to as Michael Moore-ism.
Films made in the Michael Mooreist style tend to be sensational and ultimately self-promoting; long on rhetoric and short on actual facts. The editing is usually cartoonish, relying on inter-cut clips of cartoon shows or amusing archive footage, often inserted into the film on a random cue -- what Richard Dawkins describes as a "lord privy seal" in his less-than-sparkling criticism of the film.
(Interestingly, Bill Maher's pro-atheist Expelled contained a great many such "lord privy seals" -- something that Dawkins declined to criticize. Commentators on Dawkins blog even went to great lengths to defend Maher's indulgences, which really only reinforces the known hypocrisy of many Dawkinites.)
Sometimes, the questions asked by such films are, in and of themselves, quite valid: Expelled, for example, calls into question the level of academic freedom at many institutions of higher learning, and Religulous questions many of the excesses of the religious faithful. Bowling for Columbine raised important questions about American gun culture, and about the effect organizations such as the NRA have on American society.
In the end, however, each film is ultimately self-promoting. Ben Stein clearly intends to elevate to heroic status among the community of religious believers -- or at least amongst those who believe in Intelligent Design theory. Bill Maher clearly wants to ascend to Dawkins-like status in terms of being a religion fighter. Slacker Uprising turned out to be nothing more than shameless self-promotion on Michael Moore's part, offering little more than a showcase of Moore speaking to large anti-Bush rallies and hobnobbing with like-minded celebrity buddies during the 2004 election.
Rarely has anyone gone to the lengths Moore has gone to in order to promote himself as a hero of the American left -- or, some would say, the global left, as the distinction between the two so often proves to be rather slim.
Films made in the Michael Mooreist style often feature one highly unethical feature: that of the late-film ambush, where an unsuspecting subject is lured into a compromising interview with a surprise interviewer.
Bill Maher lied to many subjects of Religulous in order to get them to appear, and later shamelessly admitted it. Richard Dawkins accused Ben Stein of lying in order to get him to appear in Expelled (but remained oddly silent when Maher admitted to lying in order to lure many of Religulous' subjects into interviews).
In each case, however, it could be argued that lying was the only way to draw these individuals into the richly-deserved limelight of ridicule. Few have parlayed outright arrogance into star status as effectively as Dawkins. And, quite frankly, anybody who has the audacity to claim to be the second coming of Jesus Christ deserves to be forced to defend that assertion in the public eye.
At base level, Moore's ambush of Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine seems to fit the same bill. Yet, as it turned out, Heston was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease during the time of the interview. While Heston certainly deserved to be called to account for his callous response to several shooting incidents, what eventually emerged was a failure of human compassion: the badgering of a man at the beginning of a slow, agonizing process of dying.
Perhaps moreso than Farenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine provided the model for the explosion of Michael Mooreist films in the succeeding years. That it won an Oscar and provided its maker with a nearly unprecedented stage from which to pronounce his political views only encouraged the proliferation of such films.
Which makes it perhaps fitting that the pale imitations of this film -- including Moore's own pale imitation -- will likely continue to be snubbed by the Academy.
But one way or the other, so long as self-promoting unethical hacks continue to look at documentary film as a venue through which they can lionize themselves, the Michael Mooreist style isn't going away.
At least now the Academy is set to stop pretending it represents any form of excellence -- technical or otherwise.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Zig Heil, herr Stein
Ben Stein's unusual osbsession with Nazis spills the boundaries of Expelled
Ben Stein provoked a great deal of outrage when, in the course of his film Expelled, he attributed the horrors of eugenics to Darwinism.
Even though he took great lengths to add the caveat that Darwinism alone isn't sufficient to lead to full-out Nazism, Stein's envokation of this led some viewers of the film to promptly walk out.
Many people invoked Godwin's Law -- the tenet suggesting that invoking Nazism in the course of debate should be treated as a consession of defeat -- to suggest that Stein had immediately conceded the argument.
In the case of Expelled and the Darwinist principles (even if they are misread and misinterpreted Darwinist principles) at the very heart of eugenics programs -- including the protracted ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Nazis -- these people are wrong. Whether they like it or not, Stein is stating simple historical fact.
Not so much in the course of a recent controversy the now-perpetually-controversial figure has provoked with his comments regarding Barack Obama's planned speech to the Democrat National Convention at Invesco Field in Denver.
"I don't like the idea of Senator Obama giving his acceptance speech in front of 75,000 wildly screaming people. That is not the way we do things in political parties in the United States of America. We have a contained number of people in an arena.Never one to quite be undone, Glenn Beck pitched in with some equally ill-concieved remarks:
75,000 people in an outdoor sports palace -- well, that's something the Fuhrer would have done.
And I think whoever is advising Senator Obama to do this is bringing up all kinds of very unfortunate images from the past."
"I've been saying that we're headed towards a Mussolini-style presidency forever. ...I mean, it's crazy!"Of course, for anyone who's bothered paying the slightest bit of attention to the 2008 Presidential Elections -- even for those who haven't -- the differences between Barack Obama and Hitler and Mussolini are so far beyond obvious that they render Stein and Beck's comments nothing short of befuddling.
Some minor similarities are undeniable. Hitler and Mussolini both marketed themselves as visionaries with the courage and intention to drastically transform their countries. Many of Barack Obama's supporters insist the same thing about him.
But the inherent malevolence of Hitler and Mussolini's messages were apparent from the very get-go. Hitler and Mussolini both succeeded because they appealed to the darkest psychological elements of their respective societies. In Hitler's case this was the bitterness provoked by the First World War-ending Versailles treaty coupled with the desperation resulting from severe economic depression.
In Mussolini's case, he appealed to a disturbing lack of confidence in the national character of the Italian state, and a belief that Italians were being left behind in the rush for international prestige.
Obama, meanwhile, has campaigned on a message of hope from the very beginning -- an idea that has slipped by even some of the most astute American conservative commentators. Consider the remarks of National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, again invoking fascism:
"I think one of the things that is decidedly fascistic, or at least just a bad idea, is looking for silver bullets. You know, when Barack Obama campaigns, he's basically saying, 'I'm a silver bullet. I'm going to solve all your problems just by electing me.' FDR, Hitler, all these guys, they basically said, 'All your problems can be solved.'"Of course, this is an implicitly inaccurate comment. There's little question Goldberg legitimately believes it, but it's still untrue.
Obama's campaign slogan -- "Yes we can" -- emphasizes the Barberian Strong Democratic principle of communal democratic action -- the idea that democracy is built from the citizenry up, not from the government down.
Certainly, Obama argues that electing him would be the first step. But Obama has never really argued that he could single-handedly solve the United States' problems. Rather, he's campaigned on the notion that, with himself as president, Americans could solve many of their problems by working together.
That's a far cry from the authoritarianism that Ben Stein decries in his Glenn Beck comments. He does, however, make on valid point:
"I think he has to recognize some bounds on his own ego. I understand politicians are politicians because they have ego deficit problems and they try to cure them by having lots of worship and adulation and adoration."Which is certainly fair comment. Certainly, many politicians are drawn to politics in order to resolve their own sense of inadequacy. Indeed, Barack Obama may be one of those individuals.
But in the end, Stein just can't clear that hump of authoritarianism:
"But 75,000 people screaming in an outdoor arena, that's just too much. It's just -- it's scarily authoritarian."Authoritarian like Hitler and Mussolini. And never mind the fact that Hitler and Mussolini both literally campaigned on a platform of authoritarianism, while Barack Obama has done the exact opposite.
Stein and Beck's Hitler/Mussolini comparisons may be the most resolute invokations of Godwin's law seen in quite a while.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Richard Dawkins Far From a Paragon of Reason
The Enemies of Reason bumps against numerous shortages of reason
Richard Dawkins has unquestionably become the growing atheist movement's resident heavyweight.
Whenever asked, he'll be the first to insist that atheism is the natural handmaiden of scientific rationalism, and insist that the only way for such rationalism to ultimately endure is for its alternatives -- notably, religion and spirituality -- to be discredited and, ultimately, destroyed.
One would be tempted to dismiss this as hysteria unless one of Dawkins' closest collaborators, "EZ" PZ Meyers, hadn't said so much himself.
However, if Dawkins and his cohorts are really so concerned with preserving rationalism and reason, one would expect that they would strictly impose themselves within the limits of these concepts.
In the hysterically titled The Enemies of Reason, a Dawkins-produced documentary aired by the BBC, Dawkins proves himself to fall far short of that.
In the first part of the two-part documentary, "Slaves to Superstition", Dawkins emerges as a curmudgeony, cynical individual prone to hyperbole.
"Science has sent orbiters to Neptune, erradicated smallpox and created a supercomputer that can do 69 trillion calculations per second," says Richard Dawkins during the opening of his television documentary, The Enemies of Reason.
"Science frees us from superstition and dogma," he adds. "And allows us to base our knowledge on evidence."
Dawkins' thesis on religion in his film becomes immediately apparent -- religion makes people small-minded and irrational, and poses a threat to the world's ability to govern itself according to reason.
Yet Dawkins indulges his own irrationality and small-mindedness at length throughout his film -- rarely as cogently as within the opening 60 seconds.
"There are two ways of looking at the world," he insists. "Through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence -- through reason."
Reason is threatened by an "epidemic of irrational thinking," he insists. Religion "impoverishes our culture," he announces. "New age gurus exhort us to run away from reality," he laments.
To Dawkins, religion is more than simply a means for individuals to seek answers to questions that science can't answer, it's some sort of insidious threat to civilization itself.
"As a scientist, I don't think our indulgence of irrational superstition is harmless," he says. "I believe it profoundly undermines civilization."
"We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining ground and science is under attack," Dawkins muses. "In this program I want to take on the enemies of reason."
Apparently, in Dawkins' mind, science is at risk of being subjected to another holy inquisition such as that inflicted upon Gallileo. But instead of resisting the spectre of dogmatic intolerance wholesale, Dawkins' solution seems to be to unleash an inquisition on religion instead.
"Increased life expectancy, health and leisure provided by modern medicine and industrial technology have given more people more time than ever before to educate themselves, express their creativity and ponder existence."
People expressing themselves and pondering existence are both pursuits that Dawkins seems fine with -- he just wishes people would restrain themselves within the means of which he personally approves.
"Yet into this better world that reason has built, primitive darkness is coming back," Dawkins laments. "A disturbing pagan mix of superstitions."
Dawkins first takes aim at astrology, trying to draw as close a comparison between it and racism as he can manage. "Amusingly, it falls afoul of our modern taboo against lazy stereotyping," he insists. "How would we react if a newspaper published a daily oolumn that read something like this: 'Germans - It is in your nature to be hardworking and methodical, which should serve you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you'll need to curb your natural tendency obey orders. Chinese - Inscrutibility has many advantages but it may be your undoing today. British - Your stiff upper lip may serve you well in business dealings, but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life'. And so on through 12 national stereotypes. Of course, the astrology columns aren't as offensive as that, but we should ask ourselves exactly where the difference lies."
The fact that racism divides people based on immediately apparent physical and cultural characteristics - skin colour, language, etc -- and astrology practices divides people more arbitrarily is obviously among the chief differences between astrology and racism, as is the fact that astrology divides people fairly evenly across (not amongst) such racial and cultural divides.
In other words, there's a world of difference between astrology and racism. Neither fall within the narrow conflines of what Dawkins would consider to be "rational" or "reasonable".
From astrology (Dawkins notes that, surprise surprise, he prefers astronomy), Dawkins moves on to belief in the paranormal -- in particular, psychics.
Once again, Dawkins is picking an easy target. The revelation of JoJo Psychic Alliance's Miss Cleo as a complete fraud served to largely discredit the psychic community.
But Dawkins makes no mention of Parapsychology, a scientific (probably better described as pseudo-scientific) field in which researchers attempt to apply the scientific method to the paranormal in an attempt to explain it, most often with mixed results. They often study psychic phenomenae.
It should be of little surprise to anyone that a scientific field would emerge to stupiy phenomenae that conventional science has all but abandoned, and perhaps for good reason -- science seems to lack the tools necessary to explain them.
In the case of psychics, Dawkins jumps on a theory offered up by skeptic illusionist Darren Brown: cold reading. Cold reading, Brown insists, is basically a glorified method of word association in which various words are offered up and subjects supply the meaning on their own.
Yet cold reading doesn't explain how an individual such as Craig Hamilton Parker could "cold read" such specific details about such specific people.
For skeptics, however, there is a far superior method of debunking many psychics -- such as the case of Peter Popoff, who ran a similar outfit, yet was revealled to be "reading" people through FM radio transmissions to a headset. Various audience members were revealled to be "cased" before hand.
As it turns out, most of Craig Hamilton Parker's congregation are regulars. This alone explains his ability to percieve details about individual members as if they have been delivered from beyond the grave. In other words, the far more rational explanation of familiarity and (perhaps even) research rather than obscure psychological trickery.
Dawkins' questions about the pyschological impact of percieved contact with the dead are also entirely legitimate -- questions that should be asked, and questions that Parker himself should certainly feel obligated to answer.
Parker insists that he's trying to help others -- and he may even believe he is -- but that doesn't change the legitimacy of Dawkins' concerns.
Dawkins then turns his attention to, of all things, dowsing -- the practice of trying to find water using sticks.
Dawkins blames time-old notions of animism -- the belief that everything existing in the world possesses some spiritual nature -- for what he dismisses as -- admittedly, because they so often are -- irrational thought.
In particular, Dawkins notes the tale of the Persian king Xerxes, who once ordered the ocean punished for destroying a bridge he had built. The belief that the ocean was a "malevolent force", Dawkins views as irrational.
Of course, Dawkins is overlooking some realities of the times in which these beliefs were widely held -- times in which many people who travelled by sea never returned alive, if they ever returned at all. The belief that the sea is malevolent could have been treated as a parable for the fact that the sea has, historically, been very very dangerous for those who dared embark upon it.
Dawkins next turns his attention toward gamblers.
He insists slot machines -- "one-armed bandits" as he describes them in the popular manner -- dispense prizes randomly.
He notes that many gamblers have their own particular routines they like to engage in, and then asks if such superstitious behaviour is the result of human evolution. He suggests that quaint notions of luck are actually the result of biological processes that help living creatures judge situations statistically in order to make decisions that help optimize survival.
Dawkins argues that supersition is little more than the fallacious side of a pattern-seeking tendency of animal minds: finding a pattern where none exists.
But for Dawkins to choose electronic gambling machines -- Video Lottery Terminals as they're known in Canada -- as his example of this is, in itself, a folly. First off, these machines don't dispense prizes randomly. They're programmed in order to dispense prizes in a manner that optimizes profit. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a random number within a computer -- only a calculated number deliberately computed to resemble randomness as much as possible.
Nor is there really any such thing as randomness in nature. The governing laws of nature -- physics, thermodynamics, biology, etcetera -- may often collude in such a incomprehensible manner as to appear random, but there is no such thing as true randomness. Thus the suggested animal instict to search for discernable patterns.
When famed psychologist BF Skinner introduced such randomness into an experiment involving pigeons, he witnessed them exhibiting superstitious behaviour -- attempting to influence patterns with "false positives" that they had percieved to influence the "random" distribution of their food.
Dawkins attributes it to a human desire to read meaning into everything -- "faces in toasted cheese" and "fortunes in tea leaves".
Of course, meaning will always remain subjective. Dawkins attributes it to a desire for an organizing force -- yet the human brain itself is an organizing force. The human brain absorbs stimulus from its environment, then natural processes within the brain manage these stimuli to a tolerable level, effectively ignoring any stimulus these processes have been conditioned to treat as immaterial or unimportant.
In other words, there are things going on around the human brain that the conscious mind never recognizes.
An obvious difference between Dawkins and the numerous "believers" he examines throughout Enemies of Reason seems to emerge: simply, that these processes of his brain have been conditioned in order to ignore stimuli that others do not, while others' brains have been conditioned in order to ignore stimuli that he does not.
One could hypothesize at length about differences between individuals like Dawkins and the believers at a fundamental neuropsycholigical level.
Once these differences are recognized, one conclusion becomes unignorable: that Dawkins' mind has reached different subjective conclusions about the nature of the world around us using different information.
It's well-known that Dawkins prefers his own method of attaching meaning to the world around him: science. But it's in this vein that a strong case can be made for at least one alternative: spirituality.
Spiritualists actually come in great variety. Dawkins turns his attention to Satish Kumar, who argues that everything in the world has both physical and spiritual properties.
Without giving Kumar's views any more than a cursory examination, Dawkins dismisses it as "fabricated meaning".
"Science and rationality are often accused of having a cold, bleak outlook,"Dawkins muses. "But why is it bleak to face up to the evidence of what we know?"
In the perception of those such as Kumar, Hamilton Parker and others such as Ben Stein, the answer to this question is very simple: because it discounts difficult questions about what we don't know. Questions of meaning and purpose, which often science will not even begin to explore.
Science is under attack, Dawkins insists. Yet Dawkins and his compatriots are the ones who have professed that they will eliminate religion. It would seem that religion is what is really under attack.
Of course, it hasn't always been this way. When Copernicus questioned the Heliocentric view of the Catholic Church, he was punished severely even after he recanted his view -- which turned out to be demonstrably correct.
There is little question that scientists were targeted by the agents of the Church -- both within the formal structure of the Inquisition, and under other, more informal guises.
But as the formal onslaught of the church against science has effectively subsided -- scientists are no longer imprisoned for their work -- Dawkins seems to believe that the time has come for the exact same evils to be turned upon religion: an inquisition of science against religion.
Individuals such as Michael Onfray have gone so far as to promise a "final battle" between religion and atheism.
For Dawkins, however, the battle is not against religion alone. He also blames postmodernism for allowing alternative worldviews to be treated with respect -- respect that he himself has proven unwilling to afford.
Yet the critiques postmodernism offers to science are entirely benign questions -- questions that, if answered, would strengthen science's claims to objective truth, rather than weaken them.
"Reason has built the modern world" Dawkins insists.
Certainly so. But reason has not built the modern world alone. Religious and spiritual movements have been alongside science all along, often acting as philosophical, moral and spiritual guides to the world. Religious and spiritual movements have provided key cultural memes around which modern societies have been built.
In his effort to enforce his strict views of scientific rationality upon others, Richard Dawkins has fallen far short of the paragon of reason he often purports himself to be.
Richard Dawkins has unquestionably become the growing atheist movement's resident heavyweight.
Whenever asked, he'll be the first to insist that atheism is the natural handmaiden of scientific rationalism, and insist that the only way for such rationalism to ultimately endure is for its alternatives -- notably, religion and spirituality -- to be discredited and, ultimately, destroyed.
One would be tempted to dismiss this as hysteria unless one of Dawkins' closest collaborators, "EZ" PZ Meyers, hadn't said so much himself.
However, if Dawkins and his cohorts are really so concerned with preserving rationalism and reason, one would expect that they would strictly impose themselves within the limits of these concepts.
In the hysterically titled The Enemies of Reason, a Dawkins-produced documentary aired by the BBC, Dawkins proves himself to fall far short of that.
In the first part of the two-part documentary, "Slaves to Superstition", Dawkins emerges as a curmudgeony, cynical individual prone to hyperbole.
"Science has sent orbiters to Neptune, erradicated smallpox and created a supercomputer that can do 69 trillion calculations per second," says Richard Dawkins during the opening of his television documentary, The Enemies of Reason.
"Science frees us from superstition and dogma," he adds. "And allows us to base our knowledge on evidence."
Dawkins' thesis on religion in his film becomes immediately apparent -- religion makes people small-minded and irrational, and poses a threat to the world's ability to govern itself according to reason.
Yet Dawkins indulges his own irrationality and small-mindedness at length throughout his film -- rarely as cogently as within the opening 60 seconds.
"There are two ways of looking at the world," he insists. "Through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence -- through reason."
Reason is threatened by an "epidemic of irrational thinking," he insists. Religion "impoverishes our culture," he announces. "New age gurus exhort us to run away from reality," he laments.
To Dawkins, religion is more than simply a means for individuals to seek answers to questions that science can't answer, it's some sort of insidious threat to civilization itself.
"As a scientist, I don't think our indulgence of irrational superstition is harmless," he says. "I believe it profoundly undermines civilization."
"We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining ground and science is under attack," Dawkins muses. "In this program I want to take on the enemies of reason."
Apparently, in Dawkins' mind, science is at risk of being subjected to another holy inquisition such as that inflicted upon Gallileo. But instead of resisting the spectre of dogmatic intolerance wholesale, Dawkins' solution seems to be to unleash an inquisition on religion instead.
"Increased life expectancy, health and leisure provided by modern medicine and industrial technology have given more people more time than ever before to educate themselves, express their creativity and ponder existence."
People expressing themselves and pondering existence are both pursuits that Dawkins seems fine with -- he just wishes people would restrain themselves within the means of which he personally approves.
"Yet into this better world that reason has built, primitive darkness is coming back," Dawkins laments. "A disturbing pagan mix of superstitions."
Dawkins first takes aim at astrology, trying to draw as close a comparison between it and racism as he can manage. "Amusingly, it falls afoul of our modern taboo against lazy stereotyping," he insists. "How would we react if a newspaper published a daily oolumn that read something like this: 'Germans - It is in your nature to be hardworking and methodical, which should serve you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you'll need to curb your natural tendency obey orders. Chinese - Inscrutibility has many advantages but it may be your undoing today. British - Your stiff upper lip may serve you well in business dealings, but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life'. And so on through 12 national stereotypes. Of course, the astrology columns aren't as offensive as that, but we should ask ourselves exactly where the difference lies."
The fact that racism divides people based on immediately apparent physical and cultural characteristics - skin colour, language, etc -- and astrology practices divides people more arbitrarily is obviously among the chief differences between astrology and racism, as is the fact that astrology divides people fairly evenly across (not amongst) such racial and cultural divides.
In other words, there's a world of difference between astrology and racism. Neither fall within the narrow conflines of what Dawkins would consider to be "rational" or "reasonable".
From astrology (Dawkins notes that, surprise surprise, he prefers astronomy), Dawkins moves on to belief in the paranormal -- in particular, psychics.
Once again, Dawkins is picking an easy target. The revelation of JoJo Psychic Alliance's Miss Cleo as a complete fraud served to largely discredit the psychic community.
But Dawkins makes no mention of Parapsychology, a scientific (probably better described as pseudo-scientific) field in which researchers attempt to apply the scientific method to the paranormal in an attempt to explain it, most often with mixed results. They often study psychic phenomenae.
It should be of little surprise to anyone that a scientific field would emerge to stupiy phenomenae that conventional science has all but abandoned, and perhaps for good reason -- science seems to lack the tools necessary to explain them.
In the case of psychics, Dawkins jumps on a theory offered up by skeptic illusionist Darren Brown: cold reading. Cold reading, Brown insists, is basically a glorified method of word association in which various words are offered up and subjects supply the meaning on their own.
Yet cold reading doesn't explain how an individual such as Craig Hamilton Parker could "cold read" such specific details about such specific people.
For skeptics, however, there is a far superior method of debunking many psychics -- such as the case of Peter Popoff, who ran a similar outfit, yet was revealled to be "reading" people through FM radio transmissions to a headset. Various audience members were revealled to be "cased" before hand.
As it turns out, most of Craig Hamilton Parker's congregation are regulars. This alone explains his ability to percieve details about individual members as if they have been delivered from beyond the grave. In other words, the far more rational explanation of familiarity and (perhaps even) research rather than obscure psychological trickery.
Dawkins' questions about the pyschological impact of percieved contact with the dead are also entirely legitimate -- questions that should be asked, and questions that Parker himself should certainly feel obligated to answer.
Parker insists that he's trying to help others -- and he may even believe he is -- but that doesn't change the legitimacy of Dawkins' concerns.
Dawkins then turns his attention to, of all things, dowsing -- the practice of trying to find water using sticks.
Dawkins blames time-old notions of animism -- the belief that everything existing in the world possesses some spiritual nature -- for what he dismisses as -- admittedly, because they so often are -- irrational thought.
In particular, Dawkins notes the tale of the Persian king Xerxes, who once ordered the ocean punished for destroying a bridge he had built. The belief that the ocean was a "malevolent force", Dawkins views as irrational.
Of course, Dawkins is overlooking some realities of the times in which these beliefs were widely held -- times in which many people who travelled by sea never returned alive, if they ever returned at all. The belief that the sea is malevolent could have been treated as a parable for the fact that the sea has, historically, been very very dangerous for those who dared embark upon it.
Dawkins next turns his attention toward gamblers.
He insists slot machines -- "one-armed bandits" as he describes them in the popular manner -- dispense prizes randomly.
He notes that many gamblers have their own particular routines they like to engage in, and then asks if such superstitious behaviour is the result of human evolution. He suggests that quaint notions of luck are actually the result of biological processes that help living creatures judge situations statistically in order to make decisions that help optimize survival.
Dawkins argues that supersition is little more than the fallacious side of a pattern-seeking tendency of animal minds: finding a pattern where none exists.
But for Dawkins to choose electronic gambling machines -- Video Lottery Terminals as they're known in Canada -- as his example of this is, in itself, a folly. First off, these machines don't dispense prizes randomly. They're programmed in order to dispense prizes in a manner that optimizes profit. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a random number within a computer -- only a calculated number deliberately computed to resemble randomness as much as possible.
Nor is there really any such thing as randomness in nature. The governing laws of nature -- physics, thermodynamics, biology, etcetera -- may often collude in such a incomprehensible manner as to appear random, but there is no such thing as true randomness. Thus the suggested animal instict to search for discernable patterns.
When famed psychologist BF Skinner introduced such randomness into an experiment involving pigeons, he witnessed them exhibiting superstitious behaviour -- attempting to influence patterns with "false positives" that they had percieved to influence the "random" distribution of their food.
Dawkins attributes it to a human desire to read meaning into everything -- "faces in toasted cheese" and "fortunes in tea leaves".
Of course, meaning will always remain subjective. Dawkins attributes it to a desire for an organizing force -- yet the human brain itself is an organizing force. The human brain absorbs stimulus from its environment, then natural processes within the brain manage these stimuli to a tolerable level, effectively ignoring any stimulus these processes have been conditioned to treat as immaterial or unimportant.
In other words, there are things going on around the human brain that the conscious mind never recognizes.
An obvious difference between Dawkins and the numerous "believers" he examines throughout Enemies of Reason seems to emerge: simply, that these processes of his brain have been conditioned in order to ignore stimuli that others do not, while others' brains have been conditioned in order to ignore stimuli that he does not.
One could hypothesize at length about differences between individuals like Dawkins and the believers at a fundamental neuropsycholigical level.
Once these differences are recognized, one conclusion becomes unignorable: that Dawkins' mind has reached different subjective conclusions about the nature of the world around us using different information.
It's well-known that Dawkins prefers his own method of attaching meaning to the world around him: science. But it's in this vein that a strong case can be made for at least one alternative: spirituality.
Spiritualists actually come in great variety. Dawkins turns his attention to Satish Kumar, who argues that everything in the world has both physical and spiritual properties.
Without giving Kumar's views any more than a cursory examination, Dawkins dismisses it as "fabricated meaning".
"Science and rationality are often accused of having a cold, bleak outlook,"Dawkins muses. "But why is it bleak to face up to the evidence of what we know?"
In the perception of those such as Kumar, Hamilton Parker and others such as Ben Stein, the answer to this question is very simple: because it discounts difficult questions about what we don't know. Questions of meaning and purpose, which often science will not even begin to explore.
Science is under attack, Dawkins insists. Yet Dawkins and his compatriots are the ones who have professed that they will eliminate religion. It would seem that religion is what is really under attack.
Of course, it hasn't always been this way. When Copernicus questioned the Heliocentric view of the Catholic Church, he was punished severely even after he recanted his view -- which turned out to be demonstrably correct.
There is little question that scientists were targeted by the agents of the Church -- both within the formal structure of the Inquisition, and under other, more informal guises.
But as the formal onslaught of the church against science has effectively subsided -- scientists are no longer imprisoned for their work -- Dawkins seems to believe that the time has come for the exact same evils to be turned upon religion: an inquisition of science against religion.
Individuals such as Michael Onfray have gone so far as to promise a "final battle" between religion and atheism.
For Dawkins, however, the battle is not against religion alone. He also blames postmodernism for allowing alternative worldviews to be treated with respect -- respect that he himself has proven unwilling to afford.
Yet the critiques postmodernism offers to science are entirely benign questions -- questions that, if answered, would strengthen science's claims to objective truth, rather than weaken them.
"Reason has built the modern world" Dawkins insists.
Certainly so. But reason has not built the modern world alone. Religious and spiritual movements have been alongside science all along, often acting as philosophical, moral and spiritual guides to the world. Religious and spiritual movements have provided key cultural memes around which modern societies have been built.
In his effort to enforce his strict views of scientific rationality upon others, Richard Dawkins has fallen far short of the paragon of reason he often purports himself to be.
Friday, July 18, 2008
This Is Where It All Breaks Down
In the wake of the release of Expelled : No Intelligence Allowed, it's become apparent that there just cannot seem to be any rational discussion of the virtues of Intelligent Design theory as compared to Evolutionary Biology.
As numerous sources will demonstrate, neither side of this debate is immune to the divisiveness and base irrationality that has swirled around this topic.
First, consider the following video of EZ Meyers and Richard Dawkins -- the latter of whom recieves what could very well be considered to be his comeuppance in Expelled -- discussing the film:
One would expect better from two such "leading intellectuals" as Meyers and Dawkins.
They start off by discussing Meyers' ejection from a screening of the film at the Mall of America -- Dawkins, for his own part, was admitted to the same screening.
While the facts surrounding the matter seem to continue to be a matter of some dispute, Meyers and Dawkins aren't far off the mark at all in describing it as "inept public relations".
But from there, Dawkins continues to let the obnoxious -- polishedly obnoxious, but obnoxious nonetheless -- side of his personality show, as he tries to pick the film apart not based on the facts or ideas contained in the film, but rather on editing technique and such.
"It was a bad film in every possible way," Dawkins insists. "It was also extremely boring."
The irony of Richard Dawkins, of all people, dismissing a film as "extremely boring" should require little explanation. Then again, of course, this is Ben Stein we're talking about -- a man who has become an iconic (if self-effacing) figure in comedy for his ability to induce boredom.
Dawkins further insists that computer generated video of cell generation is "too good" to be the work of the Expelled producers, and Meyers jumps in, attempting to credit it to the XVIVO multimedia group at Harvard University.
Premise films insists that they produced the clip themselves, and careful examination of the two pieces of work (the absolutely gorgeous XVIVO work can be viewed here) bears this to be true -- although it's hard to imagine that the XVIVO work didn't provide significant inspiration for the Expelled clip.
To take Meyers' suggestion of outright copyright violation in this particular video seriously is very difficult to do, as he actually has to stop and ask Dawkins if Expelled features any commentary during the allegedly offending clip (clearly, he has not yet seen the movie himself and could not be expected to be able to objectively judge the two clips).
Dawkins insists that the Harvard multimedia department would have had to be "duped" into allowing the use of the video -- again, conclusively not the same video -- and continues to insist that he and Meyers were Duped into taking part in Expelled.
Eventually, after returning to the complaint about Meyers being refused admission, they finish their video by discussing whether the film is second-rate or third- or fourth-rate.
The entire video comes across less as a substantive rebuttal of the film, and more as a pair of demagogues whose pride has been severely wounded.
Which would be entirely understandable, considering how significantly Dawkins managed to humiliate himself in the course of his great "showdown" with Stein in the film, as shown in this particular video (consider it exhibit B), this time of Ben Stein making himself more than just a little transparent on Glenn Beck's show on CNN:
Beck starts off by insisting that if the "New York Times hates a movie" then he himself would love it (again, an extremely mature, rational attitude).
Stein insisted that people across the United States were "standing and cheering" at the end of Expelled. However, considering the scores of self-styled Darwinists are flat-out refusing to see the film at all (again, an extremely mature, rational attitude), it isn't hard to imagine that most of these people are arriving at the theatre with pre-concieved notions in favour of Intelligent Design or Creationism.
The video features Dawkins' admission -- likely the source of his aforementioned wounded pride -- in the film in which he suggests that if an "ntelligent designer" exists as ID theory suggests, it would have to be a space alien.
Stein then criticizes Darwinism for being unable to explain gravity or thermodynamics -- neither of which are a phenomenon that Darwinism ever even attempts to explain. He then criticizes Darwinism for being unable to explain the origins of life. Again, Darwinism -- in the purest sense of the term -- doesn't attempt to explain this.
Ambiogenesis -- the field in which Dawkins studies -- does, indeed attempt to do so. But while this particular field of Evolutionary Biology -- a broader field based on Darwinian principles -- it itself isn't confined strictly within the confines of Darwinist thought.
In sort, Stein is criticizing Darwinism for being unable to explain things that it lays to claim to explain. It's a key logical misconception that only obscures the margins of this debate.
Stein also notes that he feels sad for Dawkins and his fellow atheists by noting he "feel[s] bad for them and their circles because they don't have god in their lives". Again, this obscures the margin of this debate -- is it about science, religion, or lack thereof?
Stein also suggests that Dawkins and his "circle" reject the existence of God because if God exists, they'll be judged.
But judged for precisely what? Being atheists? Being evolutionary biologists? Precisely what?
Stein doesn't provide the answer to this question, but he does conclude with an extremely valid point: the cold moral asceticism that atheism at least seems to promote -- via the lack of any real arbiter of human morality -- seems to lend itself to immoral acts, at least the hands of those predisposed to such acts in the first place.
But for as dogmatic and ideological as Meyers and Dawkins seem to be in their "rebuttal" video to Expelled, Stein seems to equal during his Glenn Beck appearance.
If asked, any one of these individuals would insist that they are the ones trying to take part in a rational scientific debate. Yet it seems every time they actually open their mouths to speak, rationality flies out the door and dogmatism appears in its stead.
In the end, this will likely be the ultimate legacy of Expelled -- a film that posed a challenge to the scientific community to take part in an open debate, but only served to further entrench both sides of the so-called "debate" so that no rational debate can ever occur.
If the breaking point hadn't occurred long, long ago, Expelled would have been that very breaking point.
As numerous sources will demonstrate, neither side of this debate is immune to the divisiveness and base irrationality that has swirled around this topic.
First, consider the following video of EZ Meyers and Richard Dawkins -- the latter of whom recieves what could very well be considered to be his comeuppance in Expelled -- discussing the film:
One would expect better from two such "leading intellectuals" as Meyers and Dawkins.
They start off by discussing Meyers' ejection from a screening of the film at the Mall of America -- Dawkins, for his own part, was admitted to the same screening.
While the facts surrounding the matter seem to continue to be a matter of some dispute, Meyers and Dawkins aren't far off the mark at all in describing it as "inept public relations".
But from there, Dawkins continues to let the obnoxious -- polishedly obnoxious, but obnoxious nonetheless -- side of his personality show, as he tries to pick the film apart not based on the facts or ideas contained in the film, but rather on editing technique and such.
"It was a bad film in every possible way," Dawkins insists. "It was also extremely boring."
The irony of Richard Dawkins, of all people, dismissing a film as "extremely boring" should require little explanation. Then again, of course, this is Ben Stein we're talking about -- a man who has become an iconic (if self-effacing) figure in comedy for his ability to induce boredom.
Dawkins further insists that computer generated video of cell generation is "too good" to be the work of the Expelled producers, and Meyers jumps in, attempting to credit it to the XVIVO multimedia group at Harvard University.
Premise films insists that they produced the clip themselves, and careful examination of the two pieces of work (the absolutely gorgeous XVIVO work can be viewed here) bears this to be true -- although it's hard to imagine that the XVIVO work didn't provide significant inspiration for the Expelled clip.
To take Meyers' suggestion of outright copyright violation in this particular video seriously is very difficult to do, as he actually has to stop and ask Dawkins if Expelled features any commentary during the allegedly offending clip (clearly, he has not yet seen the movie himself and could not be expected to be able to objectively judge the two clips).
Dawkins insists that the Harvard multimedia department would have had to be "duped" into allowing the use of the video -- again, conclusively not the same video -- and continues to insist that he and Meyers were Duped into taking part in Expelled.
Eventually, after returning to the complaint about Meyers being refused admission, they finish their video by discussing whether the film is second-rate or third- or fourth-rate.
The entire video comes across less as a substantive rebuttal of the film, and more as a pair of demagogues whose pride has been severely wounded.
Which would be entirely understandable, considering how significantly Dawkins managed to humiliate himself in the course of his great "showdown" with Stein in the film, as shown in this particular video (consider it exhibit B), this time of Ben Stein making himself more than just a little transparent on Glenn Beck's show on CNN:
Beck starts off by insisting that if the "New York Times hates a movie" then he himself would love it (again, an extremely mature, rational attitude).
Stein insisted that people across the United States were "standing and cheering" at the end of Expelled. However, considering the scores of self-styled Darwinists are flat-out refusing to see the film at all (again, an extremely mature, rational attitude), it isn't hard to imagine that most of these people are arriving at the theatre with pre-concieved notions in favour of Intelligent Design or Creationism.
The video features Dawkins' admission -- likely the source of his aforementioned wounded pride -- in the film in which he suggests that if an "ntelligent designer" exists as ID theory suggests, it would have to be a space alien.
Stein then criticizes Darwinism for being unable to explain gravity or thermodynamics -- neither of which are a phenomenon that Darwinism ever even attempts to explain. He then criticizes Darwinism for being unable to explain the origins of life. Again, Darwinism -- in the purest sense of the term -- doesn't attempt to explain this.
Ambiogenesis -- the field in which Dawkins studies -- does, indeed attempt to do so. But while this particular field of Evolutionary Biology -- a broader field based on Darwinian principles -- it itself isn't confined strictly within the confines of Darwinist thought.
In sort, Stein is criticizing Darwinism for being unable to explain things that it lays to claim to explain. It's a key logical misconception that only obscures the margins of this debate.
Stein also notes that he feels sad for Dawkins and his fellow atheists by noting he "feel[s] bad for them and their circles because they don't have god in their lives". Again, this obscures the margin of this debate -- is it about science, religion, or lack thereof?
Stein also suggests that Dawkins and his "circle" reject the existence of God because if God exists, they'll be judged.
But judged for precisely what? Being atheists? Being evolutionary biologists? Precisely what?
Stein doesn't provide the answer to this question, but he does conclude with an extremely valid point: the cold moral asceticism that atheism at least seems to promote -- via the lack of any real arbiter of human morality -- seems to lend itself to immoral acts, at least the hands of those predisposed to such acts in the first place.
But for as dogmatic and ideological as Meyers and Dawkins seem to be in their "rebuttal" video to Expelled, Stein seems to equal during his Glenn Beck appearance.
If asked, any one of these individuals would insist that they are the ones trying to take part in a rational scientific debate. Yet it seems every time they actually open their mouths to speak, rationality flies out the door and dogmatism appears in its stead.
In the end, this will likely be the ultimate legacy of Expelled -- a film that posed a challenge to the scientific community to take part in an open debate, but only served to further entrench both sides of the so-called "debate" so that no rational debate can ever occur.
If the breaking point hadn't occurred long, long ago, Expelled would have been that very breaking point.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Questions of Academic Freedom Right on Ben Stein's Money
Expelled controversial, mostly benign and -- unsurprisingly -- a target
To a certain extent, there's a degree of silliness enrapt in the Evolution/Intelligent Design debate that lies at the heart of Expelled.
Proponents of the theory of Evolution insist they can't be bothered to share academic space and time with proponents of Intelligent Design because it reeks too much of creationism. Meanwhile, those studying Intelligent Design -- who are applying engineering principles to molecular biology -- implicitly suggest that they deserve as much academic time and space as the theory generally accepted as the basis of modern biology, and one of the historical heavyweights of scientific thought.
Although trying at length throughout the film to make himself seem like an impartial observer abruptly converted to the virtues of at least discussing intelligent design, Ben Stein has clearly chosen sides. One need only consider the broader implications of his film's title, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
In other words, all the intelligent people believe in Intelligent Design, and anyone who doesn't is... well, not so much.
Whether or not Stein intended this when changing the name of the film project from Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion is truly known only to himself and possibly the film's producer, Mark Mathis. But it isn't as if anyone interpreting it as such isn't reading anything into it that isn't already there.
The film circles around what it outlines as a movement within the scientific establishment to stamp out Intelligent Design by blackballing its proponents.
The film explores cases such as that of Richard Sternberg, who was allegedly run out of the Smithsonian Institute for so much as publishing a pro-Intelligent Design article.
Serious questions have been raised about the circumstances of Sternberg's employment at and departure from the Smithsonian. However, a an investigation by Special Counsel James McVay revealled a certain degree of malice in Sternberg's colleagues reaction to the publication, and their intent to discredit him.
In other words, the truth seems to be neither what Sternberg insists, nor what his detractors insist.
A similar case emerges when considering the case of Caroline Crocker, who claims to have been disciplined after merely mentioning Intelligent Design while teaching one of her courses.
The autors of Expelled Exposed insist that Crocker was teaching various inaccurate facts in her class, as outlined in a Washington Post article.
Yet they also credit "student complaints" for the discipline levelled against her. But a quick view of Crocker's rating on Ratemyprofessors.com makes one think twice about this. In fact, your not-so-humble scribe was able to rate Crocker without any modicum of proof whatsoever that he had even studied under Crocker.
Many of the other ratings on Rate My Professor seem to be nothing more than malicious attacks aimed at Crocker, and are notably fraudulent.
Throughout the film, Stein falls back on a Berlin wall metaphor that, when considered afterward, is actually fairly tortured. He insists that the wall was built to keep western ideas out of Communist East Germany. But anyone even passingly familiar with Cold War History knows quite differently -- that the Berlin Wall wasn't built to keep capitalist ideas from getting in to East Berlin, but rather was built to stop East Germans from fleeing from communism into West Germany, discrediting the ideology.
An argument could potentially be made that proponents of Evolutionary theory have, indeed built such a wall. But Stein's metaphor is inept, and even noting that such a metaphorical wall has been built to prevent students from straying into Intelligent Design theory would have worked for Stein's purposes.
A great deal of protest has also been raised regarding Stein's equation of Darwinism and Nazism.
In particular, the authors of Expelled Exposed attempt to write Nazism off as part of a reactionary response to Darwinism, when nothing could be further from the truth. The specific combination of (perverted) Darwinist thought with some of the subtle Nietzchean underpinnings of Nazi ideology lent themselves quite conveniently to the brutal eugenics program undertaken by Nazi Germany.
Expelled Exposed also accuses Stein of deliberately omitting a portion of The Descent of Man that follows the portion Stein quotes. Stein quotes:"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick, thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."The omitted portion reads as follows:
"The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature."Yet this does nothing to expel the very real tendency of people such as Adolf Hitler to take portions of such tracts that confirm their beliefs -- and Hitler is noted to have had a pathological obsession with killing in the name of eugenics, musing in one writing that Germany would anually euthanize up to 100,000 "unfit" newborns -- and ignore what does not.
Not to mention the fact that Stein doesn't simply denounce Darwinism as akin to Nazism, but rather Nazism as a destination for Darwinism left untouched by any sense of morality, such as that offered by religion.
Even then, as we've seen in Canada with Alberta's historical eugenics program, Darwinism can still lead to unethical and unjust eugenics when religious morality, although present, breaks down.
The most amusing portion of Expelled arrives as Stein moves toward his final confrontation with Atheist fundamentalist and Evolutionist Richard Dawkins.
In the course of a conversation as to why Dawkins believes Intelligent Design should be definitively rejected by the scientific community -- and Dawkins is only one of many scientists interviewed who insist such -- Stein mercilessly grills Dawkins, and eventually Dawkins suggests it's plausible that life was seeded on earth by a vastly advanced alien civilization.
Which is far from a scientific hypothesis.
It reveals, however, the dogmatism of Dawkins and those like him. He is perfectly willing to accept the idea of an intelligent designer, but refuses to consider that perhaps a "loving god" -- as Stein alludes to in the trailer for the film -- could be that designer. Instead, he relies on a "magical sky daddy" of a different -- and equally unproven -- colour.
Which reveals the amount of faith Dawkins has really based his argument on. Considering the number of proteins that would have to align in perfect sequence in order to become living cells, Richard Dawkins could sit and watch a pool of proteins for every second of every day in his life and never witness it.
For an Atheist, to thusly believe in the Darwinian model of the origins of life, that requires an awful lot of faith. It certainly isn't empirically or scientifically proven (the process of evolution certainly is -- the origins of life not so much).
So for Dawkins, it certainly can't be about science. Perhaps for individuals like Dawkins, the struggle against Intelligent Design is really about stamping out any scientific theory that carries even the vaguest traces of Creationism. It would certainly explain why such individuals have sought to associate Intelligent Design and Creationism as closely as possible.
But a lot of this is actually immaterial: where Expelled excels is in underscoring the slow erosion of academic freedom on University campuses and within Science Acadamies across North America and Europe. He's entirely justified in noting that if Darwin himself wanted to propose such an alternative to Evolutionary theory in today's academic culture, he would face incredible opposition spanning scientific, religious and political divides.
One thing is for certain: Ben Stein certainly hasn't done himself any favours when he made this film, nor has he done himself many favours in the course of commenting on it afterward (this will be commented on here in coming days).
Ben Stein has effectively been villainized by the scientific establishment that he questions throughout the duration of Expelled. Which brings one to an important point:
From a group of people who insist that there is no shortage of freedom in modern academia, it's interesting to see how personal a cost they clearly intend to exact upon someone who isn't even an academic.
Then again, no one forced Ben Stein to wade into this debate. He certainly knew he was taking certain risks, and far be it for those whose orthodoxies he's clearly offended to prove him wrong.
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