Yesterday I went with my step father-in-law to see Ben Stein's new film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed".
I actually really enjoyed it.
Stein's easing personality is funny and uniquely charming. I love his facial expressions and his tone of voice and his way of asking the most obvious questions in the most earnest fashion. I like his dryness. I like his sarcasm. I like his ability to instantiate comedic situations. I like his shoes.
The film is really well put together cinematically, and it even makes a decent case that there has been some shifty censorship in the American scientific academy.
Then it progresses into some of the actual arguments proffered by the budding Intelligent Design movement.
Because of this progressive quality to the film, it can be difficult to summarize its thesis. Nevertheless, in light of the overarching theme indicated by its title, I offer the following summary of "Expelled": the prevailing posture assumed by scientific academia in America is wrongfully both dogmatic and censoring.
Even though I like Stein's personality and think that he does a winsome job of establishing his thesis, I maintain that that thesis was wrong-headed to begin with.
The movie's central metaphor is the Berlin Wall. The idea is that the entrenched neo-Darwinian machine discriminates against those whose views are fundamentally distinct from it, thus acting like a kind of intellectual wall preventing alternative paradigms from being considered. Images of the Jewish Stein speaking in exposé of the cases of censorship he documents are cross-cut with images of Reagan speaking his infamous instructions to Gorbachev to "tear down this Wall".
But is the metaphor justified? Certainly censorship is like a wall in many respects, but just as sure as the fact that not all walls are created equal, it is so that we ought not condemn all instances of censorship. Stein himself admits this during a line in the film when he tentatively reasons, "perhaps Intelligent Design
should be censored - I mean, we don't want scientists teaching that the earth is flat" (paraphrased).
Stein implies that if there isn't any substance to Intelligent Design, as there is no substance to Flat Earthism (
or is there?), it deserves to be censored.
This point should be obvious. Nobody is complaining about the censorship of
Spontaneous Generation in American science classrooms. That's because
there is a consensus on its falsity. We've learned that maggots aren't spontaneously generated by rotting meat, and any who teach so authoritatively should be criticized, characterized as child abusers, and
prosecuted like the leaders of the FLDS.
We've thrown out concepts like the
Ether, and "
Ectoplasm" is now only used to comedically make points in philosophical literature.
We distinguish between alchemy and science.
C. S. Lewis' friend Dorothy Sayers wrote a book called "Creed or Chaos: Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster", whose point and mine are virtually one and the same. There simply must be a standard, some orthodoxy, a common worldview whose alternatives are censored in some fashion. This is true of religion and it is true of science.
Both need creeds.
A friend to them both, G. K. Chesterton provides us with a well put insight:
Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.
That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.
- Orthodoxy, Chapter 3: The Suicide of Thought
That is true of religious authority and it is true of scientific authority.
What the Darwinists have right is that when we as a society determine that a scientific theory is well-supported enough, we should teach it. And
something should be reared as a barrier - a wall - in protection of it.
And when we have determined that a paradigm has little merit (like Flat Earthism, the Ether, and Ectoplasm), we
absolutely should censor it from being taught in our schools.
Censorship doesn't have to mean that we never speak of something again. We could mention it in history (like Alchemy or Roman Mythology), English (like Atlantis), World Religion (like Islam), philosophy (like the postmodern epistemology), or even in the science classroom if it merits mention as a controversial movement under development (like M-Theory) - so long as we do not teach fringe theories as scientific doctrine. There must be a paradigmatic scientific orthodoxy whose teaching prevails until it is unseated (think of how Einsteinian relativity unseated Newtonian physics).
This isn't a matter of free speech like Stein claims. Let's be honest; he has been allowed to make this film! And according to its website, it will be propagated more extensively than any other documentary:
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” will boast the largest U.S. opening of any documentary film ever. Scheduled for release in 1,000 theatres, “Expelled” will be hotter than “Farenheit 9/11,” which debuted on 868 screens, and much more convenient to see than “An Inconvenient Truth,” which I was surprised to find opened on only four screens nationwide despite all the hype, peaking at 587 before its appeal melted.
-The blog for "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"
Therefore even if Stein succeeds in documenting several cases in which those with questions about Darwinism were censored in a harsh or at least secretive manner, he fails to establish that they who no longer maintain the prevailing orthodoxy should not have been censored at all.
The effort is wasted, because there will always (at least
should always) be a standard platform on which we
absolutely require our teachers to stand - and fire them if they cease to. Making it politically incorrect to do so will only result in its occurrence being performed secretly.
Should we then be so surprised that this is perhaps already happening?
Or worse yet - efforts like Stein's just might succeed in tearing down the Wall altogether.
Can you imagine what kind of crazy theories that would allow to come flooding into the academy? What if science professors were allowed to teach whatever they want?
The prevailing scientific paradigm in America is
rightfully both dogmatic and censoring.
Instead of arguing that the prevailing scientific orthodoxy of today is wrongfully dogmatic and censoring, Stein should argue that the prevailing scientific orthodoxy of today is wrong. He should then offer a rival paradigm powerful enough to unseat the current orthodoxy.
But isn't that what he does during the latter stages of the film? Haven't I been a bit unfair to Intelligent Design, by comparing it with such barbaric concepts as the Ether and Flat Earthism? Isn't it the case that the neo-Darwinian machine is so stubborn that it is refusing to even consider Intelligent Design as an alternative paradigm in the first place? Haven't the Darwinists replaced an open-minded scientific posture with a closed-minded one? Haven't they erected a Wall that keeps even the citizens out? Isn't that the whole point of the film?
There are two claims bound up in the reaction I anticipate from my modest but beloved and probably largely theistic readership. The first is that the prevailing Darwinian orthodoxy is too stubborn to consider alternative paradigms. The second is that Intelligent Design is a robust scientific theory, which deserves consideration.
I disagree with both.
In rebuttal of the first claim, allow a word from a recent LA Times opinion writer:
In Charles Darwin's own time, of course, numerous books and articles were published critiquing his theory, and through the turn of the century there was still no underlying mechanism to explain how natural selection works and why so much skepticism remained. From the 1930s through the '60s, the neo-Darwinian synthesis and its many variants seriously revised many aspects of Darwin's original theory. In the '70s, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge successfully remodeled Darwinian gradualism with their theory of punctuated equilibrium.
In the 1980s, Lynn Margulis overthrew neo-Darwinism in the microscopic world with her theory of symbiogenesis, demonstrating that random changes in DNA and natural selection alone do not lead to speciation (at a science conference I attended she said, "It was like confessing a murder when I discovered I was not a neo-Darwinist"). In the '90s, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists battled Gould's and Richard Lewontin's belief that Darwinism cannot account for much of human psychology and culture. Currently, David Sloan Wilson's theory of group selection is making inroads into seriously modifying models of individual selection, and I even heard the highly respected evolutionary theorist William Provine (featured in "Expelled") tell an audience of scientists, "Natural selection does not shape an adaptation or cause a gene to spread over a population or really do anything at all."
-Michael Shermer
Darwinism has undergone scrutiny at every turn.
And in rebuttal of the second claim, that Intelligent Design is a robust theory, which deserves consideration, allow a second word from the same writer:
the ID proponent Paul Nelson (also featured in "Expelled") confessed: "Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don't have such a theory right now, and that's a problem. Without a theory, it's very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we've got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as 'irreducible complexity' and 'specified complexity' -- but, as yet, no general theory of biological design."
And this point shouldn't be too controversial either; even the Discovery Institute's list of dissenters has as its creed:
We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.
-Dissent From Darwinism
This is not a stand-alone theory, which makes falsifiable predictions about the future in order to direct scientific research. It is an undercutting statement about an existing theory. But that's just their Dissent website. What about their main site? It suffers from the same problem:
Intelligent Design starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what inferences can be drawn from that evidence.
-What is Intelligent Design?
The keyword cited above is "inference". The current state of Intelligent Design is one of inference; it starts with the evidence and works backwards, reasoning to the best explanation. Such a method may provide a little warrant for certain beliefs, but it ought not masquerade as Scientific. Science is one particular method of inquiry, whereby falsifiable predictions about the future are made (not inferences about the past).
Perhaps the Intelligent Design movement is on the right track, but it has a very long way to go in order to rival the reigning orthodoxy, and it ought not demand respect until it has earned it.
There are no shortcuts.
Then, when Intelligent Design unseats the neo-Darwinian machine, becoming king of the Hill, and proceeds to govern research in the Scientific Kingdom, it can appreciate the Wall without being hypocritical.
