Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008)

This ninety-minute documentary by Ben Stein about Intelligent Design (ID) has grossed over $7 million within its first month of release, as this critique is written. It is highly controversial. With zero publicity, the movie has depended on church groups and word of mouth. With about a million tickets sold so far, it is already a profitable movie, with bright prospects yet ahead.

Mainstream critics have panned it mercilessly. It has also generated a tremendous amount of online discussion, represented by flaming bloggers as well as more by more sober reflections, from both sides of the debate. Like many viewers, I had a visceral reaction to Stein’s know-it-all manner, and his gratuitous Holocaust footage, but I have also re-thought my position on the intellectual issues underlying the ID movement.

In this critique, I will discuss both the movie’s weaknesses that invited such a Niagara of negative reviews, and also a positive value that Expelled potentially has to offer.

The Movie and the Writer, Producer, and Star. This is a low budget film by a first time film maker. This could account for its more obvious cinematic shortcomings. Let’s dispose of one major negative distraction now.

Stein has a tendency to splice in cheesy film clips. These do little to illustrate the narration, but often disrupt the continuity. My take on it is, Stein realized that the heavy, talky subject matter needed some light, visual elements to make his movie more tolerable. He also needed to control costs by choosing cheap licensing sources (hence, a lot of old, old sources). One good piece of visual material imported into the movie consists of an animated sequence about “The Casino of Life.” The company that made this illuminating little feature has sued over copyright infringement.

The basic structure of Expelled apes (no pun) Michael Moore’s formula: interviews with partisans on both sides, some obtained by ambush. Mostly, Stein lets his sources, including the atheists, speak for themselves. Some protested that his editing was unfair and taken out of context. I tend to agree, but it’s his movie, and they all signed releases.

Stein opens the movie with a lecture tour moment. He marches onto a stage and launches into a speech about the trend he sees in science education, whereby those who espouse ID have been persecuted by the scientific establishment. The movie ends up full circle back at that same lectern, with Ben Stein’s rousing peroration in defense of truth, and of his lonely crusade to lead the charge against tyranny. He invites his audience to join him: “Anyone? Anyone?” echoing his most famous line in Ferris Bueller’s Holiday. Turns out that this scene was one of the only set-ups in the movie, to resemble the Al Gore lectures in An Inconvenient Truth. The audience members were all movie extras.

The movie proper consists of two main parts, developing Stein’s main arguments. The first part asserts that evolutionists have built an intellectual Berlin Wall against teaching ID in science classes. Those who deviate from the party line by bringing up ID have been banished through unfair firings or denial of tenure. I do care if colleges have done anything unethical in terms of persecuting their own faculty members, or of jimmying tenure processes. Likewise, if Ben Stein’s argumentation about this serious issue has itself been deceptive, that would also be unethical, and our readers should know about that as well.

The second part of Expelled is of much greater interest to the general audience. In it, Ben Stein takes on the theory of evolution. He argues that it is inherently atheistic, hence, biased against God in the study of biology or of the origins of the universe. Stein goes further. He argues that evolution is a necessary (but not sufficient) cause of extreme Social Darwinism, including the misguided “science” of eugenics, and of Hitler’s campaign to eradicate the Jews. Stein’s main method is to show an extended sequence of scenes from the Berlin Wall, and of some gruesome shots of Nazi genocide in Dachau.

Frankly, this argument is a fallacy. It begs the question of any substantive linkage between Darwin and Nazism. The Dachau footage is the most inflammatory image in the movie. What if Ben Stein imagined that Darwin’s theory contributed to the spread of child porn? What images would that justify him to include? Returning to the statement of his main case, I will defer to others who have the credentials to judge Ben Stein’s take on evolution vs. ID, and his philosophical and theological analysis.

So, who is Ben Stein? The son of Herb Stein, President Nixon’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Ben Stein graduated from Yale Law School and practiced law at the outset of his career. He is also an actor with an active and successful career, with over seventy appearances on TV and in the movies. His most memorable role was in Ferris Bueller. He emcees a TV show, Giving Away Ben Stein’s Money.

As if that were not enough, Ben Stein is a prolific author, writing primarily personal finance and economics books, but also conservative political opinion pieces. He has published in the Wall Street Journal, and he has a regular column in The American Spectator in which he positions himself on the right wing of the Republican Party.

Ben Stein is intelligent and articulate, but he is neither a trained scientist nor a philosopher. No doubt, he sincerely believes in the ID cause. He describes himself as Jewish, but not devout. He states that his concern is less about religion than about the political ramifications of ID as opposed to the dominant Darwinian paradigm now universally accepted among the scientific elite.

In the movie, it is difficult to take him seriously, given his public persona as a comedian and gadfly. He comes across as tongue-in-cheek at times. Ben Stein seemed most genuinely affected and honest in the sequence where he visited a WWII museum devoted to the memory of the Nazis’ extermination of disabled and mentally retarded Jews. He also acquitted himself well in his final confrontation with Richard Dawkins, where his probing cross exam actually bested the famous atheist in their mini-debate.

My Ethical Concerns. At the level of his first argument about the employment status of pro-ID science professors, I did some fact checking. Much of the following is found in Wikipedia. It is also available by googling their names. Ben Stein has not been completely up front with the evidence he cites for his case.

In the movie, he names four individuals who, he claims, were fired, or were denied tenure, solely because of the bias against them. Here’s a review of the cases he cites.

1. Richard Steinberg, a journal editor at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, lost his job over an ID-friendly article he published. A Congressional hearing ensued but went nowhere. Steinberg was not an employee, but a volunteer worker.

2. Dr. Caroline Crocker, “beloved professor” at George Mason University, was fired because she taught ID in her science class. GMU officials verify only that her contract was not renewed. In fact, Dr. Crocker was not tenured, nor in a tenure track position. She was part-time with no job security rights. She has since been appointed as Executive Director of an outfit called the IDEA Center, a non-profit dedicated to promoting ID.

3. Dr. Robert J. Marks II of Baylor University claims that the university shut down his research web site. The University says only that it removed the website from under the auspices of its sponsorship and its logo. Dr. Marks is still employed as a Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering at Baylor. His tenure was never in jeopardy. Dr. Marks was involved with Dr. William Dembski at the ID lab while it existed. It was never a part of any of Baylor’s science departments.

Readers are more familiar with the whole Baylor ID lab episode than I am. My focus is on Ben Stein’s claim that the science establishment persecuted professors and denied their academic freedom. For that limited claim, Dr. Marks is not a good example.

4. Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, the movie’s prime example, was an associate professor of astro-physics who was denied tenure at Iowa State University. That is a fact. ISU has undergone a firestorm of protest from ID sources over this case because Dr. Gonzalez is an eminently qualified scientist. However, he was denied tenure because his scientific research, which was excellent, was all produced prior to his appointment at ISU.

Some of the facts in Dr. Gonzalez’ case were as follows: While at ISU, none of his publications met scientific standards, since they were nearly entirely devoted to his ID essays and talks. In a physics department whose faculty members averaged over $1 million in grants per year per professor, Dr. Gonzalez attracted only a few thousand dollars to publish and promote his previous research. None of his advisees graduated.

Dr. Gonzalez followed the university’s procedures to appeal his adverse tenure decision. He was denied at every stage up to and including the president of the university, who, atypically for a higher education administrator, is uniquely qualified to read and judge scientific publications. He had done so in hundreds of previous tenure reviews at several other top tier graduate science institutions. Finally, tenure was denied to four of the twelve applicants within the department over a ten year period, indicating that the requirements were tough and had been applied rigorously as a matter of accepted policy.

Dr. Gonzales subsequently accepted a position as director of a new astronomy program at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, a small Christian liberal arts school that subscribes to the inerrancy of the Bible in its mission statement.

5. As to the general point that the science establishment has frozen out ID research, the Discovery Institute website includes these facts:

The Discovery Institute has spent over nine million dollars over the last decade to fund grants for colleges and universities to underwrite faculty salaries and research into ID. It has provided grants up to $60,000 to graduate students in paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy in its campaign to promote ID. In terms of the Institute’s overall budget, this is a significant outlay. It undermines Stein’s claim that higher education persecutes ID adherents. Some colleges and universities, at least, foster the study of ID.

A Potential Positive Contribution. Spokespersons for ID on camera make sense, metaphysically. Dr. William Dembski, for one, is a remarkable scholar who possesses six advanced degrees in math, philosophy, and theology. His publications on information technology have won high recognition.

Dembski has been something of an academic gypsy, including his ill-fated sojourn at Baylor. Since then, he spent a year on the faculty of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Currently he is research professor at Southwestern Seminary in Ft. Worth. Dembski’s comments on camera regarding the competing world views between science and theology deserve attention. Other pro-ID figures are also represented, including some who have good scientific credentials.

All, including Dembski, take pains to distance themselves from the Institute for Creation Research, which has a spotty academic reputation. Observing the contortions ID has gone through since its own origins in Creationism, you could say that it has evolved. By the same token, evolutionary theory has also undergone radical changes since Darwin.

The main argument for ID is not scientific, but [theo]logical: it is statistically improbable that the complex designs observed in nature could have resulted from random chance alone. Design, according to ID theory, implies a Designer. The Discovery Institute concedes that the cosmic Designer need not be supernatural. Scientific method has no way to prove or to disprove it, but it is a legitimate philosophical question.

The Bottom Line. Ben Stein’s Expelled fails to prove unfair employment discrimination. He does not delve into underlying legal issues surrounding state boards of education and high school science classes, which have all gone against ID in the courts. Philosophically, and theologically, the movie has the potential to raise public awareness of questions about atheism vs. belief in God, and especially, God’s place in the origin or life and of the cosmos. Darwin’s theory of evolution does not even address those questions, only the origin of the species. The study of evolutionary changes in nature does not exclude God’s existence, even if publicly funded education prohibits any discussion of religious doctrines in science classes, as a matter of accreditation. What about other kinds of classes?