Why Can't We Question This?

Well I'm sitting in a motel room in (or near?) Cincinnati eating cherry sours, and that reminded me of Sour Patch Kids, which of course reminded me I'm long overdue writing my review of Expelled.

I took Sour Patch Kids with me to the movie, so that's how the association link gets me back there. They were tasty, but left my teeth sensitive for days. I think I burned off some enamel with the super-sour powder!

I brought along my own candy for a couple of reasons. First, there's nothing more fun than sitting in what is going to be an adult crowd at a movie eating "noisy candy," something in a crinkly bag that can't be chewed very quietly. Second, it's a little rebellious since the theater doesn't want me to bring in treats, preferring I buy theirs instead. The whole movie was themed around free thought and challenging unnecessary rules, so in that spirit -- Sour Patch Kids!

And now, finally, my review. I have watched all of Michael Moore's documentaries in the past couple of years except Roger and Me. That one hasn't been available at Blockbuster. I started tentatively and skeptically because he is such an in-your-face political leftist I wasn't sure what value would be in his movies. I was very pleased to find out his movie-making style is humorous, personable, and pleasantly brazen, even if not quite brilliant. Just when he seems to be on the verge of making an important point, he backs away and starts spouting party-line talking points. Still, for blatant propaganda, it's entertaining.

I start with Michael Moore because he is the best-known and possibly best politically based documentary propagandist making films, so his work is a sort of benchmark. Ben Stein incorporates many of Moore's techniques in the construction of Expelled. We follow Stein on a "journey of discovery" to get at the truth, a Michael Moore staple. He sets up expectations based on pop culture news coverage of his topic and then takes a closer, often biting, and often stunning look at things as they really are.

The movie is very brave. Hard-line Darwinian evolutionists wind up fumbling over the huge holes in a random, material-world-only explanation of life on earth and its diversity. They pretty much dodge the issue of evolution from simpler to more complex species with sarcasm and derision, completely revealing the fact they have no clue how the irreduceable complexity of an eye could evolve.

Stein gets renowned scientists to speculate on the origins of life on earth by saying perhaps chemicals were on crystals, and as the crystals formed with defects they just "happened" to get all 250 protein sequences right to become DNA. The scientists' favorite answer to dodge the statistical near impossibility of life randomly beginning was to agree that life on earth could have been seeded by extraterrestrials.

And the coup de grace -- Richard Dawkins, evangelistic atheist and harsh opponent of the theory of intelligent design, said he believes in intelligent design. Of course, the intelligence would have to be extraterrestrials planning the variety of life on earth, and they themselves could only have appeared by completely random evolutionary processes. But Dawkins clearly acknowledged that observing life on earth leads to the reasonable conclusion that design was involved.

Stein's greatest achievement with this film is probably his willingness to expose the intent of scientists opposing intelligent design and advocating Darwinian evolution only, in spite of the holes. They admit their goal is to remove religion as an important part of people's lives and elevate science in its place. He doesn't get to subtle but significant distinction in the science vs. religion argument, however.

Science as a field is limited by definition to the study of the material, observable world. It must look for the material, non-supernatural explanation for anything. Which is fine and reasonable, because it's science! But the ENORMOUS error scientists make is to say that, because science limits itself to material explanations, only the material world exists and is valid. That is NOT what science says at all. Science only says, "We cannot study things we cannot directly measure and observe."

The movie is quite moving when Stein takes the audience on a brief history of Darwinian thought and where it has led: in the United States to progressivism and the eugenics movement of the 1920's where 50,000 people were forceably sterilized, and through the philosophies of socialism and Kantian and Nietschian humanism to the anti-religious experiments in government in Europe that culminated in the Soviet and Nazi threats to democratic and free civilization.

Stein, though Jewish, focuses not on the mass genocide of Jews and gypsies by the Nazis in his tour of Germany, but on the tens of thousands of people killed in gas chambers because they were disabled or impaired. He reminds all of us that Adolf Hitler spoke often about natural selection, and how "soft" civilizations that took care of their weaker members were keeping evolution from improving the human species. Hitler sought to rectify that and give natural selection a big boost.

Was Nazism a right-wing phenomenon? Hardly! With socialist goals and anti-religious materialism as its foundations, it was a close kin of the anti-religious zealousy trying to silence a modern-day discussion of intelligent design as a possible explanation of the holes in Darwinian evolution. Had Stein made that point clear -- that the oppression of thought in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was leftist and has the same roots as the oppression of the discussion of intelligent design -- this movie could have achieved true greatness. As it stands, it is a wonderfully-made, entertaining, and powerful film.

Hopefully people who see this film will understand that forbidding debate about Darwinian evolution, which as a theory has significant holes and by no means accounts for the variety of life on the planet, is akin to the totalitarian oppression of socialism's two variants, communism and fascism. Hopefully people will stand against baseless dogma imposed from above and say

"Why can't we question this?"

To freedom of thought, freedom of ideas, and freedom to debate