Ben Stein Hope in Finding God Again

I've been accused of refusing to review Ben Stein'southward documentary "Expelled," a defence force of Creationism, because of my conventionalities in the theory of evolution. Here is my response.

Ben Stein, you hosted a TV show on which you gave abroad money. Imagine that I accept created a special edition of "Who Wants to exist a Millionaire" only for you. Ben, you've answered all the earlier questions correctly, and now you're upward for the $ane million prize. It involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. You accept already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong answers. Now yous are faced with two choices: (A) Darwin'due south Theory of Development, or (B) Intelligent Design.

Because this is a special edition of the program, you tin can employ a Hotline to telephone every scientist on World who has an opinion on this question. You discover that 99.975 of them agree on the answer (A). A million bucks hangs in the remainder. The clock is ticking. You could use the coin. Which practice you choose? You, a firm believer in the Constitution, are not intimidated and exercise your freedom of speech. Yous choose (B).

Squaaawk!!! The klaxon horn sounds. You lot take lost. Outraged, you file suit confronting the program, charging it is biased and has denied a hearing for your belief. Your adjust argues that the "correct" answer was chosen considering of a prejudice against the theory of Intelligent Blueprint, despite the fact that .025 of one pct of all scientists support it. Yous call for (B) to exist discussed in schools as an culling theory to (A).

Your rights have been violated. Yous're at wit's terminate. You think perhaps the field of Indie Documentaries offers you hope. You accept a position at the Establish of Undocumented Documentaries in Dallas, Texas. This Plant teaches that the rules of the "$64,000 Question" are the only valid game evidence rules. All later on game shows must follow them literally. The "$64,000 Question" came into beingness in 1955. Fake evidence for earlier game shows has been refuted by scientists at the Institute.

Y'all look for a documentary subject. You lot know you lot cannot promise to find backing from the Main Stream Media, because they all fear reprisals from the powerful Game Show Establishment. You seek a cause that parallels your own dilemma, and as well illustrates an offense against the Freedom of Speech. Your attention falls on the persecution of Intelligent Pattern advocates like you, who take been banished from Main Stream Academia. This looks like your ideal field of study. But where tin can you find financing for such a documentary? You discover a minor, promising production visitor named Premise Media. You lot similar the audio of that word premise. It sounds like a plausible alternative to the word theory. To ostend this, you look both up in your dictionary: premise noun. A previous argument or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion: if the premise is truthful, then the determination must be true. e.g., if God exists, so he created everything.

theory noun. A system of ideas intended to explicate something, esp. ane based on full general principles independent of the thing to exist explained. e.1000., Darwin's theory of evolution.

Your point exactly! You exercise a web search for Premise Media. Its co-founder, Walt Ruloff, has observed, "the scientific and academic communities were securely resistant to innovation, in this case innovation that might revise Darwin's theory that random mutation and natural pick 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, possibly within the final 10,000 years. How to account for dinosaur fossils? Obviously, dinosaurs walked the world at the same time as human being beings.

Dinosaurs walk the earth at the same time equally Aisle Oop.

Ben Stein, y'all are growing more excited. You go along your inquiry into Premise Media. Its CEO, A. Logan Craft, in one case observed that questions nigh the origin of Earth and its life forms "are answered very differently past secularists and people who concord religious beliefs." Can you believe your eyes? Craft has depended upon one of your own favorite logical practices, the principle of the excluded middle! This is too good to exist true.

By his premise no secularists believe in Intelligent Design, and no people with religious beliefs subscribe to Darwin's theory. If there are people with religious beliefs who hold with Darwin (Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, for case) they are mistaken considering they do not subscribe to A. Logan Craft's religious beliefs.

He is certainly right well-nigh secularists. You think it'due south a shame he's correct, because and so the 1968 Supreme Court decision was correct, and Tennessee's anti-evolution constabulary was "an attempt to absorb out a detail theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, taken literally." Therefore, according to the Court, ID was a religious belief and did not belong in a scientific discipline classroom but in a theology classroom. This clearly would exist wrong, because the new approach to teaching ID in schools omits whatever reference whatsoever to faith. It depends entirely on the findings of scientists who are well-respected within A. Logan Craft's religious tradition. These scientists of grade are perfectly free to be secularists, although almost every single one seems to exist a fundamentalist Christian. This is America.Yous meet 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 lot should change the proposed title of your picture show, "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 not always been argued very well in the by. For example, a photograph of a human footprint overlapping a dinosaur track (proof that Human walked the Earth side past side with dinosaurs) has been questioned by secularists, who say the footprint looks more than like the print of a running shoe. If you lot studied it carefully, it could be argued that they had a point, although skewed past their secularist bias.

What was needed was improve use of photographic bear witness. For example, in your flick, "eXpelled: no intelligence allowed," you document the story of Guillermo Gonzales, who was denied tenure at Iowa Land because of his personal premises, after 400 professors signed a petition opposing "all attempts to stand for Intelligent Design every bit a scientific try." Gonzales was forced to accept employment at Grove City College, an evangelical Christian school in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

In documenting the secularist hysteria and outrage against Gonzales, y'all use more convincing photographic evidence than the footprint. For example, y'all apply footage showing a newsstand selling copies of the New York Mail with this front end page headline:

CRISIS: 1. Creationist on the loose two. Back up the Petition 3.Finish Gonzales

The typographical design of the New York Mail service logo, the cars and shop signs in the background, and the article of clothing of the people in the street institute without question that this footage was filmed in the late 1940s. Gonzales was born in 1963. Then your film would testify beyond dubiousness that his enemies walked the Earth with his parents.

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

Gonzales, trained as an astronomer, cited as proof of Intelligent Design that "Globe is in a prime location for observing the universe." Thus he refutes the theory of elitist secularist academia that the universe "does non accept an border nor center, but as the Earth's surface does not have an edge or center." Since all you have to exercise is look upward at the heaven to realize that the whole universe is right up there to be seen, the secularists fly in the face of common sense. Yet for stating such an obvious premise, Gonzales was opposed for tenure at Iowa Land. That striking home, Ben Stein. He was a victim like y'all.

Yous release your pic "eXpelled."Equally you fully look from all your experience, it is rejected well-nigh unanimously by 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 non catalogued by Tomatoes, ChristianAnswers.net writes that your film "has made Ben Stein the new hero of believers in God everywhere, and has landed a smart correct cantankerous to the protruding jaw of evolution'south elite."

Once again, the useful excluded heart. Those for whom Ben Stein is not a hero are not believers in God. Information technology also follows that the phrase "believers in God everywhere" does not extend to believers in God who agree with Darwin. And so ChristanAnswers has excluded ii middles at one fell stroke.

Let's hope that word doesn't go back to the bosses of the critic named "Yo" at hollywoodjesus.com. Yo takes a chance by saying:

This creator could have been anything of intelligence, including aliens. Intelligent Design is a scientific movement, not a religious ane, a fact stated more than than once in interviews in this moving-picture show. Unfortunately, those statements are constantly ignored every bit '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 can conspicuously come across Yo'southward mistake. He has included the middle.

Here is Stein's most 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 straight from Monty Python. He thinks there'south a "very good chance" that life might have started with molecules on crystals, which accept a tendency to mutate. Cut to a shot of a turbaned crystal-brawl gazer. Stein dubs them "joy riding crystals." He wonders what the odds would exist of life starting that way.

"You would accept to have a minimum of 250 proteins to provide minimal life functions," an ID defender explains. We meet an animated cartoon of the Darwinian scientist Richard Dawkins pulling at a slot machine and lining up--three in a row! Not and then fast at that place, "Lucky" Dawkins! The camera pulls back to prove one-armed bandits stretching into infinity. To win, he'd have to hitting the jackpot virtually a gazillion times in a row. An Intelligent Design advocate estimates a streak like that would take a trillion, trillion, trillion tries. (That number is a fair slice larger than iii trillion.)Quite a joy ride. ID'southward argument against the crystal theory seems similar a new version of its classic argument, "How could an eye evolve without knowing there was annihilation to see?" Very easily, evidently, because diverse forms of eyes have evolved 26 different times that scientists know most, and they can explain how information technology happened. So can I. Then can you if you empathise Darwinian principles.

Anyhow, the slot machine puzzler is based on an ignorance of both math and gambling. From math nosotros know that the odds of winning a coin toss are exactly the same every time. The coin doesn't remember the last try. Hey, sometimes y'all get lucky. That's why casinos stay in business.

The odds of winning on a unmarried number at roulette are 37 to 1. The odds of winning a 2nd time in a row are also 37 to one, because the tabular array doesn't know who you are. Every single winning roll beats the odds of 37-to-ane. And on and on. The more times in a row you win, the more times you lot face 37-ane against y'all. If Russian Roulette were played with a gun containing 37 bullets and ane empty chamber, information technology would quickly lose virtually of its attraction--by a process explained, oddly plenty, by Darwin.

Even so, in July 1891 at Monte Carlo, the same man bankrupt the 100,000 franc banking concern at a roulette tabular array three times. Wikipedia reports, "A human named Charles Wells won 23 times out of thirty successive spins of the bike...Despite hiring individual detectives the Casino never discovered Wells's system. Wells afterward admitted information technology was just a lucky streak. His system was the loftier-risk martingale, doubling the stake to make up losses."

The odds against Wells doing that are pretty high. But as every gambler knows, sometimes you practice actually hit a number. You don't have to do information technology a trillion trillion trillion times to be a winner. You only have to practice it once. This is explained by Darwin. If you are playing at a tabular array with other gamblers and y'all win $100 and none of them do, you are just that much improve able to outlive them as competitors. When the casino closes, ane person at that table must have won more any of the others. That'due south why casinos never shut. Of form if you gamble long enough, y'all will somewhen lose back more than the others. Your poor spouse tells you this. You know it is true.

But tonight you feel lucky. If you leave the tabular array however holding your pot, you lot could become equally rich equally Warren Buffett. Somebody has to. Look at Warren Buffett. Evolution involves holding onto your winnings and investing them wisely. You don't even have to know to how to concur onto your winnings. Evolution does it for you; it is the banking concern in which useful genetic mutations eolith themselves. There is a very slow charge per unit of return, merely it's compounded. At the end of one eon, yous get your bank statement and find your pittance has grown into an orang utan. At the end of the next eon, information technology has grown into Charles Darwin. Scientists, at to the lowest degree 99.875 percent of them, believe that in the long run just useful mutations deposit in this depository financial institution. Those mutations with no use, or a negative upshot, squander their savings in a long-running bunko game, and die forgotten in the gutter. [1]

The assumption of "Expelled" is that no one could possibly explain how Prof. Monty Python's molecules and their joy-riding crystals could possibly produce life. As luck would take it, at about the same time as the film was beingness made, teams of scientists at the universities of Oregon and North Carolina explained it. They "adamant for the starting time time the atomic structure of an ancient protein, revealing in unprecedented detail how genes evolved their functions."

"This is the ultimate level of detail," said the evolutionary biologist Joe Thornton. "We were able to see exactly how evolution tinkered with the aboriginal structure to produce a new function that is crucial to our own bodies today. Nobody'south always done that before." Unfortunately, this momentous discovery was announced about too late to be mentioned in Ben Stein's film. It wasn't totally too late, merely it would accept been a great inconvenience for the editor.

What tools did the scientists use? Supercomputer programs and, I quote, "ultra-high energy X-rays from a stadium-sized Avant-garde Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to chart the precise position of each of the 2,000 atoms in the ancient proteins." What did yous look? They put a molecule nether a microscope and picked off bits with their tweezers?

Richard Dawkins: Rafting the River out of Eden

Intelligent Design "scientists" in "Expelled" are offended past beingness called ignorant. When Stein points out that "Catholics and mainstream Protestant groups" take no trouble with the theory of Evolution, he is informed by an ID advocate, "liberal Christians side with everyone against Creationists." Now we take the smoking gun. It is the word liberal. What is the word liberal doing hither? The Theory of Evolution is neither liberal nor conservative. It is simply provable or non.

As well, I would not describe the Vatican as liberal. Look how cautiously it approached Galileo. He merely claimed the earth revolved effectually the sun. No big bargain similar the earth being ideally placed in the universe. There are millions of conservative scientists, and merely a tiny handful disagree with evolution, because rejecting scientific proof is not permissive conservative behavior. In that ane use of the word "liberal" the Creationist religious agenda is peeking through. I would translate information technology equally "evolutionists side with anybody against a cherished Evangelical conventionalities." Why are they always trying to push button evolutionists over the edge, when they're the ones clinging past their fingernails?

Scientists deserving of the proper name would share the delight of 99.975 pct of his or her colleagues afterwards learning of the Oregon-N Carolina findings. Then, if they found a plausible reason to doubt them, they would go right to work hoping to win fame by disproving them. A theory, like a molecule, a sea slug and a polar bear, has to fight it out in the survival of the fittest.

"Expelled" is non a bad motion-picture show from the technical point of view. Information technology is well photographed and edited, sometimes agreeable, has well-chosen talking heads, gives an airing to evolutionists nevertheless truncated and interrupted with belittling images, and incorporates entertainingly unfair historical footage, as when it compares academia's rejection of Creationism to the erection of the Berlin Wall.

Hilariously, the motion picture argues that evolutionists cannot tolerate dissent. If you lot were to stand upwardly at a "Catholic and mainstream Protestant" debate and express your support of Creationism, you would in most cases be politely listened to. In that location are few places as liberal as Boulder, Colo., where I twice debated a Creationist at the Conference on World Affairs, and yet his views were heard politely there. If you were to stand upwards at an evangelical coming together to defend evolution, I doubt if yous would be made to feel as welcome, or that your dissent would be quite as 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 counterfeit astonishment. Example:

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

Ben Stein (nods, grateful to acquire this): "I run across!"

The more you lot know almost evolution, or unproblematic logic, the more than you are likely to be appalled past the film. No ane with an ability for critical thinking could lookout more than three minutes without condign aware of its tactics. It isn't even subtle. Accept its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, apparently-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we meet a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins' face. Later on he is prepared and composed, after the smoothen has been taken off his nose, hither comes evidently, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I take done television receiver interviews for more than 40 years. I accept been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, they will await like death warmed over. There is non a person reading this right now who should continue photographic camera without some kind of makeup. Fifty-fifty the obligatory "shocked neighbors" standing in their front yards after a murder normally have some powder brushed on past the photographic camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to curlicue while Dawkins was being fabricated up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on world would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his arroyo throughout the pic. If you want to report Gotcha! moments, start here.

That is but 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 (not a unmarried identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same matter, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of spoken communication and freedom to teach religion in a university grade that is non nearly religion.

And at that place is worse, much worse. Toward the terminate of the film, we find 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 not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is but getting warmed upwardly. He takes a field trip to visit one "upshot" of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. "As a Jew," he says, "I wanted to meet for myself." We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. "Information technology's difficult to describe how information technology felt to walk through such a haunting place," he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. Information technology filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not hard for me to draw how you fabricated me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian conventionalities. It fills me with contempt.

[Footnote 1] My statement is correct every bit far as it goes, just 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 it volition come up heads (a i-in-two chance). The odds of getting ii heads in a row is a one-in-2-to-the-ability-of-two chance, or one-in-four. Five heads in a row is 1:2^5, or one-in-xxx-ii. A hundred heads? 1:ii^100, or roughly 1 in ane.3 trillion trillion trillion (thank Gates for the trivial calculator plan on my reckoner). A creationist would claim that all the lucky chances that development requires is like getting non i, not five, but millions upon millions of heads in a row.

"Just the creationists are forgetting something. Evolution ISN'T random, as they often claim. It's selected. You can't really blame creationists for missing this fact...Darwin cleverly concealed information technology from view by calling his theory 'natural selection.' Let'south return to our coin-tossing example, this time including the principle of selection. What if, afterwards every toss, we had the option of not counting information technology? What if we were allowed to merely discard every toss that came upwards tails? At present, given the power to select, how long would it take to rack upwardly a hundred heads in a row? About two hundred throws.

"Once you lot understand the concept of selection, and how information technology applies to evolution, you realize that what was thought to be vanishingly unlikely actually becomes nearly inevitable."