The most bizarre thing about the new intelligent-design propaganda
film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed isn’t that former Nixon
speechwriter Ben Stein is being paid to extol a pseudoscience whose
hypotheses can’t be tested (everyone has a price), or that the film
compares science with Nazism and Stalinism (though it does, repeatedly
and remorselessly). What’s truly weird is that the filmmakers don’t
seem to understand the tenets of intelligent design.
Proponents of intelligent design—which is essentially a legal
strategy, developed in the wake of a Supreme Court decision rejecting
the teaching of creationism in public schools—try to discern
traces of an intelligent designer in the universe and in living things.
Crucially, however, the “theory” remains agnostic as to the identity of
that designer. This was an important component of the legal
underpinning of the movement: If intelligent-design proponents ever
hinted that the designer was God, the teaching of intelligent design in
schools would, like the teaching of creationism, constitute an
infringement on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. At the same
time, though, not naming the designer meant that
intelligent-design proponents like Michael Behe had to allow the
possibility that their designer is one of many gods, or even an
intellectually superior alien. (This problem was memorably satirized by
followers of the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster.)
So when Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and atheist who
is a prominent critic of intelligent design, concedes to Stein in
Expelled that he is open to the idea that aliens may have
seeded our planet with life, intelligent design has actually scored a
point (even if Dawkins never argues that an alien visitation could be
somehow inferred from the evidence, and even though the theory of
natural selection isn’t particularly preoccupied with how life first
began). But this modest victory means nothing to the movie’s target
audience of evangelical Christians, so Stein takes the intellectually
bankrupt way out and makes vicious fun of Dawkins for believing in
aliens.
Intellectual bankruptcy is in fact the defining characteristic of
Expelled. Stein flits around the country collecting risibly
anecdotal evidence of a conspiracy to choke academic freedom
(apparently tenure-track professors have an inalienable right to spend
their time writing intelligent-design textbooks instead of
peer-
reviewed journal articles, and unpaid research associates at
the Smithsonian have a right to… well, I’m not exactly sure what
Richard von Sternberg wasn’t permitted to do), but he never
bothers to define his terms. You won’t learn the definition of
intelligent design from this movie, much less anything about the theory
of evolution by means of natural selection.
Instead, you’ll be told that scientists are all vehement atheists.
Not a single agnostic or religious person who accepts the theory of
natural selection appears in the film. You’ll learn that the Discovery
Institute’s headquarters in downtown Seattle are modestly sized, and
that Ben Stein had a conspicuously difficult time locating them. (The
filmmakers go to great lengths to persuade you they received no funding
from the think tank that normally holds a monopoly on efforts to
publicize
intelligent design. By the way, 10 of the last 10 posts
on the Discovery Institute’s blog Evolution News & Views are about
Expelled—including “Discovery Salutes Expelled“
and “Is There a Connection Between Hitler and Darwin?”) Clumsy montages
of archival film clips will try to convince you that the science
departments of research universities are like the Soviet Union, East
Germany, and Communist China all rolled up in one ivory tower. And,
most memorably, you’ll be warned that accepting Darwin’s theory of
natural selection is a slippery slope that will soon have you espousing
eugenics, embracing racial purity and genocide, and sieg-heiling Hitler
himself.
Comparing one’s opponent to Hitler is a debate technique so
unsophisticated it would get you laughed off an internet message board.
(The Discovery Institute doesn’t allow comments on its blog.)
Expelled doesn’t resort to this evolution-leads-to-Hitlerism
hysteria in passing. It devotes a solid 20 minutes of its running time
to a sequence in which Stein, who is Jewish, visits a German hospital
where Nazis starved, murdered, and cremated the physically and mentally
disabled. Asked what inspired this cruelty, a random museum docent (who
doesn’t speak English very well) softly replies, “Darwinism.” Never
mind that scientific theories do not stand or fall depending on whether
homicidal dictators wantonly misinterpret them, or that Charles Darwin
was never a proponent of social Darwinism, or that he contributed only
a modest portion of modern evolutionary theory. Just compare scientists
to Nazis—that’ll, uh, really convince everyone that intelligent
design should be welcomed as a legitimate scientific pursuit.
If Expelled is the best argument the
intelligent-design crowd can muster, thinking people who hope that
the next generation will be taught the scientific method—not
lazy, religiously motivated shortcuts like intelligent design—can
breathe a sigh of relief. 
