Ben Stein Hope in Finding God Again

I've been accused of refusing to review Ben Stein'due south documentary "Expelled," a defense of Creationism, considering of my belief in the theory of evolution. Here is my response.

Ben Stein, you hosted a Tv show on which you gave abroad coin. Imagine that I have created a special edition of "Who Wants to exist a Millionaire" just for you. Ben, yous've answered all the before questions correctly, and now yous're up for the $1 one thousand thousand prize. Information technology involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. Y'all take already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong answers. Now you are faced with 2 choices: (A) Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or (B) Intelligent Design.

Because this is a special edition of the program, you can use a Hotline to telephone every scientist on Earth who has an stance on this question. You discover that 99.975 of them hold on the answer (A). A million bucks hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking. You could employ the money. Which practise you choose? Y'all, a business firm believer in the Constitution, are not intimidated and practise your freedom of speech. You cull (B).

Squaaawk!!! The klaxon horn sounds. You accept lost. Outraged, you lot file conform against the program, charging information technology is biased and has denied a hearing for your belief. Your suit argues that the "correct" answer was chosen because of a prejudice against the theory of Intelligent Pattern, despite the fact that .025 of one percent of all scientists support it. You call for (B) to be discussed in schools as an culling theory to (A).

Your rights have been violated. You lot're at wit's finish. You recall perhaps the field of Indie Documentaries offers you hope. You have a position at the Institute of Undocumented Documentaries in Dallas, Texas. This Found teaches that the rules of the "$64,000 Question" are the only valid game evidence rules. All subsequently game shows must follow them literally. The "$64,000 Question" came into existence in 1955. False testify for before game shows has been refuted by scientists at the Establish.

Y'all look for a documentary subject. You know y'all cannot hope to find backing from the Main Stream Media, because they all fearfulness reprisals from the powerful Game Testify Establishment. You seek a cause that parallels your ain dilemma, and also illustrates an offense confronting the Freedom of Speech. Your attention falls on the persecution of Intelligent Pattern advocates similar you, who have been banished from Principal Stream Academia. This looks similar your ideal subject. Simply where can yous detect financing for such a documentary? You detect a minor, promising production company named Premise Media. You like the sound of that word premise. It sounds like a plausible alternative to the word theory. To confirm this, you lot look both up in your lexicon: premise noun. A previous statement or proposition from which some other is inferred or follows equally a determination: if the premise is true, then the determination must exist true. east.g., if God exists, and then he created everything.

theory noun. A organization of ideas intended to explain something, esp. i based on full general principles contained of the affair to be explained. eastward.g., Darwin's theory of evolution.

Your point exactly! You do a spider web search for Premise Media. Its co-founder, Walt Ruloff, has observed, "the scientific and academic communities were deeply resistant to innovation, in this case innovation that might revise Darwin's theory that random mutation and natural selection drive all variation in life forms." You could not agree more. Darwin's theory has been around for 150 years, and is stubbornly entrenched. This is a time for innovation, for drawing on fresh theories that life and the universe were intelligently created in contempo times, perhaps within the last x,000 years. How to account for dinosaur fossils? Plain, dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time every bit human beings.

Dinosaurs walk the globe at the same time as Aisle Oop.

Ben Stein, you are growing more excited. Yous continue your research into Premise Media. Its CEO, A. Logan Craft, in one case observed that questions about the origin of World and its life forms "are answered very differently by secularists and people who hold religious behavior." Can you lot believe your eyes? Craft has depended upon one of your ain favorite logical practices, the principle of the excluded centre! This is besides skillful to be true.

Past his premise no secularists believe in Intelligent Pattern, and no people with religious beliefs subscribe to Darwin's theory. If there are people with religious beliefs who concur with Darwin (Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, for example) they are mistaken because they do not subscribe to A. Logan Arts and crafts's religious beliefs.

He is certainly right nearly secularists. You think it'due south a shame he's right, because and then the 1968 Supreme Courtroom decision was correct, and Tennessee'southward anti-evolution constabulary was "an try to absorb out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, taken literally." Therefore, co-ordinate to the Court, ID was a religious belief and did not belong in a science classroom only in a theology classroom. This clearly would be wrong, considering the new approach to teaching ID in schools omits any reference whatsoever to faith. It depends entirely on the findings of scientists who are well-respected inside A. Logan Craft'due south religious tradition. These scientists of grade are perfectly costless to be secularists, although nearly every single one seems to be a fundamentalist Christian. This is America.Y'all run into with the people at Premise Media. It is a meeting of the minds. At a pitch meeting, they are receptive to your ideas, although with the proviso that you should alter the proposed title of your film, "From Darwin to Hitler," because that might limit the market place to those who had heard of neither, or only one.

Y'all and Premise Media agreed that the case for ID had non e'er been argued very well in the past. For example, a photograph of a human being footprint overlapping a dinosaur track (proof that Homo walked the Globe side by side with dinosaurs) has been questioned by secularists, who say the footprint looks more like the print of a running shoe. If you studied information technology carefully, information technology could exist argued that they had a betoken, although skewed by their secularist bias.

What was needed was better use of photographic show. For example, in your moving picture, "eXpelled: no intelligence allowed," yous document the story of Guillermo Gonzales, who was denied tenure at Iowa State because of his personal premises, after 400 professors signed a petition opposing "all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific effort." Gonzales was forced to take employment at Grove City College, an evangelical Christian school in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

In documenting the secularist hysteria and outrage against Gonzales, you utilise more convincing photographic show than the footprint. For instance, you use footage showing a newsstand selling copies of the New York Post with this forepart folio headline:

Crunch: 1. Creationist on the loose 2. Support the Petition 3.Cease Gonzales

The typographical blueprint of the New York Post logo, the cars and shop signs in the groundwork, and the vesture of the people in the street establish without question that this footage was filmed in the late 1940s. Gonzales was built-in in 1963. And so your film would prove across doubt that his enemies walked the Earth with his parents.

Charles Darwin, defenseless in the act of evolving from a monkey

Gonzales, trained every bit an astronomer, cited as proof of Intelligent Pattern that "Earth is in a prime number location for observing the universe." Thus he refutes the theory of elitist secularist academia that the universe "does non have an edge nor center, just as the Earth'south surface does not have an edge or center." Since all you have to do is look up at the sky to realize that the whole universe is right up there to be seen, the secularists fly in the face up of common sense. Yet for stating such an obvious premise, Gonzales was opposed for tenure at Iowa State. That hit home, Ben Stein. He was a victim like you.

You release your film "eXpelled."As you lot fully expect from all your feel, information technology is rejected virtually unanimously past the MSM. It receives an 8% rating on the TomatoMeter, earning it a place on the list of the worst-reviewed films of all time. In a review not catalogued by Tomatoes, ChristianAnswers.cyberspace writes that your film "has made Ben Stein the new hero of believers in God everywhere, and has landed a smart right cross to the protruding jaw of evolution'due south aristocracy."

Once more, the useful excluded middle. Those for whom Ben Stein is non a hero are not believers in God. It also follows that the phrase "believers in God everywhere" does not extend to believers in God who agree with Darwin. So ChristanAnswers has excluded two middles at one cruel stroke.

Permit's hope that give-and-take doesn't get dorsum to the bosses of the critic named "Yo" at hollywoodjesus.com. Yo takes a run a risk by saying:

This creator could have been anything of intelligence, including aliens. Intelligent Design is a scientific movement, non a religious ane, a fact stated more than once in interviews in this flick. Unfortunately, those statements are constantly ignored as 'Expelled' continually brings upwards the question of God's existence and thereby equates the movement with a belief in God.

And right there, Ben Stein, we tin clearly see Yo'south error. He has included the middle.

Here is Stein's well-nigh urgent question: "How does something that is not life turn into something that is?" Stein poses this stumper to a jolly British professor who seems directly from Monty Python. He thinks there'south a "very good chance" that life might have started with molecules on crystals, which have a tendency to mutate. Cut to a shot of a turbaned crystal-ball gazer. Stein dubs them "joy riding crystals." He wonders what the odds would be of life starting that way.

"Y'all would have to have a minimum of 250 proteins to provide minimal life functions," an ID defender explains. We see an animated cartoon of the Darwinian scientist Richard Dawkins pulling at a slot machine and lining upward--three in a row! Not then fast in that location, "Lucky" Dawkins! The camera pulls back to show ane-armed bandits stretching into infinity. To win, he'd accept to hitting the jackpot virtually a gazillion times in a row. An Intelligent Design advocate estimates a streak like that would accept a trillion, trillion, trillion tries. (That number is a fair slice larger than iii trillion.)Quite a joy ride. ID'south statement against the crystal theory seems similar a new version of its archetype argument, "How could an centre evolve without knowing in that location was annihilation to encounter?" Very easily, manifestly, because diverse forms of eyes accept evolved 26 different times that scientists know about, and they can explicate how information technology happened. So tin can I. And then can you if you empathize Darwinian principles.

Anyway, the slot machine conundrum is based on an ignorance of both math and gambling. From math we know that the odds of winning a money toss are exactly the same every time. The coin doesn't recall the final attempt. Hey, sometimes y'all go lucky. That'south why casinos stay in business organisation.

The odds of winning on a unmarried number at roulette are 37 to 1. The odds of winning a 2d fourth dimension in a row are also 37 to 1, because the table doesn't know who you lot are. Every single winning scroll beats the odds of 37-to-1. And on and on. The more times in a row you win, the more than times you face 37-i confronting you. If Russian Roulette were played with a gun containing 37 bullets and i empty chamber, it would quickly lose most of its allure--by a procedure explained, oddly plenty, by Darwin.

Still, in July 1891 at Monte Carlo, the same man broke the 100,000 franc banking company at a roulette table three times. Wikipedia reports, "A man named Charles Wells won 23 times out of xxx successive spins of the wheel...Despite hiring private detectives the Casino never discovered Wells'due south arrangement. Wells afterward admitted it was just a lucky streak. His organization was the high-take chances martingale, doubling the stake to brand up losses."

The odds against Wells doing that are pretty high. But every bit every gambler knows, sometimes you do really hit a number. You don't take to exercise it a trillion trillion trillion times to be a winner. You merely accept to practise it once. This is explained past Darwin. If you are playing at a table with other gamblers and yous win $100 and none of them do, y'all are just that much better able to outlast them as competitors. When the casino closes, one person at that tabular array must have won more than any of the others. That's why casinos never close. Of course if you lot gamble long plenty, you will somewhen lose dorsum more than the others. Your poor spouse tells y'all this. You know it is truthful.

Only this evening you experience lucky. If y'all go out the table notwithstanding holding your pot, you could become every bit rich as Warren Buffett. Somebody has to. Await at Warren Buffett. Evolution involves holding onto your winnings and investing them wisely. Y'all don't even take to know to how to hold onto your winnings. Development does information technology for you; it is the bank in which useful genetic mutations deposit themselves. There is a very slow rate of render, only it's compounded. At the end of one eon, you get your bank argument and find your pittance has grown into an orang utan. At the end of the next eon, it has grown into Charles Darwin. Scientists, at least 99.875 pct of them, believe that in the long run only useful mutations deposit in this bank. Those mutations with no use, or a negative effect, squander their savings in a long-running bait-and-switch game, and die forgotten in the gutter. [1]

The supposition of "Expelled" is that no one could possibly explicate how Prof. Monty Python'southward molecules and their joy-riding crystals could possibly produce life. Every bit luck would have it, at most the same fourth dimension as the moving picture was beingness made, teams of scientists at the universities of Oregon and North Carolina explained it. They "determined for the first fourth dimension the atomic structure of an ancient protein, revealing in unprecedented detail how genes evolved their functions."

"This is the ultimate level of item," said the evolutionary biologist Joe Thornton. "We were able to run across exactly how evolution tinkered with the aboriginal structure to produce a new role that is crucial to our own bodies today. Nobody'south always done that earlier." Unfortunately, this momentous discovery was announced nigh too late to be mentioned in Ben Stein's movie. It wasn't totally too late, but information technology would have been a great inconvenience for the editor.

What tools did the scientists utilize? Supercomputer programs and, I quote, "ultra-high free energy 10-rays from a stadium-sized Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to nautical chart the precise position of each of the 2,000 atoms in the ancient proteins." What did you expect? They put a molecule nether a microscope and picked off $.25 with their tweezers?

Richard Dawkins: Rafting the River out of Eden

Intelligent Pattern "scientists" in "Expelled" are offended by being chosen ignorant. When Stein points out that "Catholics and mainstream Protestant groups" accept no problem with the theory of Evolution, he is informed by an ID advocate, "liberal Christians side with anybody against Creationists." At present we take the smoking gun. It is the word liberal. What is the word liberal doing here? The Theory of Evolution is neither liberal nor conservative. It is simply provable or not.

Besides, I would non describe the Vatican as liberal. Await how charily it approached Galileo. He only claimed the world revolved around the sunday. No big deal like the earth being ideally placed in the universe. There are millions of bourgeois scientists, and only a tiny handful disagree with evolution, because rejecting scientific proof is not permissive conservative beliefs. In that one employ of the give-and-take "liberal" the Creationist religious agenda is peeking through. I would translate it as "evolutionists side with everyone against a cherished Evangelical conventionalities." Why are they ever trying to push button evolutionists over the edge, when they're the ones clinging by their fingernails?

Scientists deserving of the name would share the please of 99.975 percent of his or her colleagues after learning of the Oregon-North Carolina findings. So, if they found a plausible reason to doubt them, they would go right to piece of work hoping to win fame by disproving them. A theory, similar a molecule, a sea slug and a polar carry, has to fight it out in the survival of the fittest.

"Expelled" is non a bad picture show from the technical bespeak of view. It is well photographed and edited, sometimes amusing, has well-called talking heads, gives an airing to evolutionists nonetheless truncated and interrupted with belittling images, and incorporates entertainingly unfair historical footage, as when information technology compares academia'southward rejection of Creationism to the erection of the Berlin Wall.

Hilariously, the movie argues that evolutionists cannot tolerate dissent. If you were to stand upwardly at a "Cosmic and mainstream Protestant" debate and limited your support of Creationism, you would in nearly cases be politely listened to. At that place are few places as liberal every bit Bedrock, Colo., where I twice debated a Creationist at the Conference on World Affairs, and yet his views were heard politely there. If y'all were to stand up up at an evangelical meeting to defend evolution, I doubt if you would be made to feel as welcome, or that your dissent would be quite equally cheerfully tolerated.

Ben Stein and the author of "On the Origin of Species"

In the film, Ben Stein asks predictable questions, and exploits an unending capacity for apocryphal astonishment. Example:

Scientist: "Merely Darwin did not title his book On the Origin of Life. He titled it, On the Origin of Species."

Ben Stein (nods, grateful to learn this): "I run into!"

The more than you lot know about evolution, or elementary logic, the more you lot are likely to be appalled past the moving picture. No one with an ability for critical thinking could sentry more than three minutes without becoming enlightened of its tactics. Information technology isn't fifty-fifty subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the final time, nosotros see a makeup creative person carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins' face up. After he is prepared and equanimous, after the polish has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, downwardly-to-globe, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I accept washed television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Anybody is made upwards before going on television. If they are not, they will expect like expiry warmed over. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory "shocked neighbors" standing in their forepart yards after a murder unremarkably have some pulverization brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to ringlet while Dawkins was being fabricated upward? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would accept taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you desire to study Gotcha! moments, start here.

That is simply one revealing fragment. This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (non a single identified laic among the ID people), segues betwixt quotes that are not nigh the aforementioned thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely groundless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not near organized religion.

And there is worse, much worse. Toward the finish of the film, we notice that Stein actually did desire to championship it "From Darwin to Hitler." He finds a Creationist who informs him, "Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism." He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would non telephone call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted generally by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such handling.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one "effect" of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. "As a Jew," he says, "I wanted to encounter for myself." We encounter footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. "Information technology'southward difficult to depict how it felt to walk through such a haunting place," he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you lot with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who stand for the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on globe. Information technology is not difficult for me to depict how you made me experience by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your statement for a peripheral Christian belief. Information technology fills me with contempt.

[Footnote one] My statement is correct as far as it goes, simply a reader, Steve Vanden-Eykel, supplies a much clearer explanation of the principle. He writes me:

Imagine flipping a coin over and over. For each toss, the odds are fifty-50 that information technology will come up heads (a ane-in-2 adventure). The odds of getting two heads in a row is a one-in-2-to-the-power-of-ii chance, or one-in-iv. V heads in a row is 1:2^v, or one-in-thirty-two. A hundred heads? ane:ii^100, or roughly one in 1.3 trillion trillion trillion (thank Gates for the little calculator programme on my computer). A creationist would claim that all the lucky chances that evolution requires is like getting not one, not 5, but millions upon millions of heads in a row.

"Just the creationists are forgetting something. Development ISN'T random, as they often merits. It's selected. You can't really blame creationists for missing this fact...Darwin cleverly curtained it from view by calling his theory 'natural pick.' Let'southward render to our coin-tossing example, this time including the principle of selection. What if, after every toss, we had the choice of not counting it? What if we were allowed to simply discard every toss that came up tails? Now, given the ability to select, how long would it accept to rack upwards a hundred heads in a row? Nearly two hundred throws.

"Once you empathise the concept of pick, and how information technology applies to evolution, you realize that what was thought to be vanishingly unlikely actually becomes about inevitable."