Stay tuned for a comprehensive refutation (probably after midterms). Here is, minute by minute, basically all the arguments that Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed makes. Please note that A) I’m simply stating what the movie is saying in the following in most of the entries, not that I actually believe this shit, and B) these are approximate times.
00:42 - Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.
04:05 - Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDer are being persecuted.
05:11 - Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning - not promoting - intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.
06:35 - Neurosurgeon Michael Egbert asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.
07:20 - Professor Marsh of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.
08:53 - Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University was denied tenure because he claimed in his book the Privileged Planet that the universe had an intelligent designer. All this despite his “stellar research record” - no pun intended.
10:56 - GODWIN’S LAW #1 Far more to come!
15:02 - Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman claims that the notion of ID masquerading as religion is a “red herring” and that the Discovery Institute relies on scientific evidence and has persons of all religions, “including agnostics”. Intelligent Design is simply the study of patterns in nature that are best explained by an intelligent creator
20:17 - As Newtonian Physics has been supplanted as well, Darwinism is an obsolete 19th century theory that is falling apart in the face of new evidence.
21:50 - Dr. Stephen Meyer states that it’s his job as a scientist to stop “one hand from clapping” and challenge the conventional theory of Darwinism. He claims that for every shred of evidence supporting Darwinism, there is a counterargument that supports ID.
22:54 - Jonathan Wells claims that Darwinists are distorting the evidence and are “harming science”.
25:15 - Mathematician David Berlinski claims that evolution is so vague about so many things that it cannot fit mathematical models like other theories and points to the vague definition of “species” as one of Darwinism’s fallacies.
27:04 - Darwin was arrogant in titling his book “The Origin of Species” rather than “The Origin of Man”, and presumed to know more than he could prove.
28:13 - Ben Stein incredulously points to a “Darwinist” documentary film that states that “perhaps the chemicals in the early Earth’s atmosphere were jump started by lightning”
28:45 - The Miller-Urey experiment, where a chemical composition believed to mimic that of the early Earth’s atmosphere and catalyzed with lightning, failed to produce life.
29:35 - Ben Stein mocks Michael Bruce’s hypothesis that “life was jumpstarted on the backs of crystals”, stating that he would not bet Ben Stein’s Money on it (haha).
31:22 - A cell could not have been the result of Darwinian evolution because it is a machine of at least 250 perfectly ordered proteins, each of which has to work to maintain a lifeform. Therefore there must be an intelligent design to make something this ordered and precise.
35:16 - 3D CGI animation of cell metabolism ripped off from Harvard (which is now suing) and “enhanced” with whoosing noises to maintain the attention of Ben’s hickish audience.
39:02 - Communism!
39:31 - Ben fawns over Capital Hill town idiot Congressman Mark Souder (R-IN), who has proposed a bill preserving “academic freedom” at the Smithsonian in response to Sternberg’s “persecution”. This is just one of many examples of “The Academy”, a shadowy organization dedicated to eliminating God from the science lab.
41:29 - The National Center for Science Education is at the forefront of keeping Darwinism in power. They are one of many watchdog organizations, along with that demonic ACLU, which is in cahoots with The Academy.
43:35 - Darwinism turns goodly, God-fearing Christians into Atheists! Just look at Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers! Beware!
44:18 - Ben uses the example of the Abrams Report on MSNBC (now Verdict w/ Dan Abrams), who absolutely dismantled a lawyer from the Thomas More Law Foundation representing the defendants of the Dover School District Trial to show that the media is firmly in the hands of Big Science.
45:41- Pamela Winnick “refused to take sides” in an article on the evolution-ID debate. But the Darwinists still persecuted her because she refused to show enough deference to evolution.
46:36 - Darwinism has infiltrated the courts in a last-ditch attempt to stop Intelligent Design. Representing the vanguard of the effort is the ACLU.
49:44 - Darwinists have given up on defending their own theory, and have simply resorted to attacking their opponent (religion and intelligent design) like a dirty politician.
53:12 - There have been plenty of religious people who are also scientists like Isaac Newton and Galileo. Darwinists don’t have a monopoly on good science.
57:22 - PZ Myers was not only converted to atheism through Darwinism, but now also actively seeks to marginalize religion, bring it down, and make it irrelevant in the public sphere.
1:00:52 - Hitler’s views on superior races mirrors Darwin’s own theories, and a necessary pre-requisite to Nazism was Darwinism. At the time, many eugenicists used Darwin’s theory to justify the slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and infirms en masse.
1:04:03 - Ben Stein visits a German concentration camp and learns from the museum curator that the mass murderers used Darwin to justify their actions.
1:06:28 - Ben meets with Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, who further emphasizes the link of eugenicists to both the Nazi Regime and Charles Darwin. Oh yeah, and Margaret Sanger and the abortionists (ie Planned Parenthood) are actually closet eugenicists and were in on the action as well through forced sterilization.
1:11:32 - Some professor (name is not spoken) claims that Darwinism dehumanizes people and allows abortions and euthanasia to happen.
1:13:21 - Stein quotes from Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, and seems to make the claim that Darwin was for weeding out those “undesirables” in society just like Hitler and the Nazis after him.
1:15:57 - Intelligent Design is not a science issue; It’s a freedom of speech issue and it’s disturbing that America are persecuting these people when it’s supposed to be the freest country in the world. The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves.
1:22:41 - Ben Stein confronts Richard Dawkins over whether there’s a 99% chance or a 49% chance that God doesn’t exist.
1:25:27 - Richard Dawkins doesn’t know how the first self-replicating molecule (life) came to be. How could the exemplar of Darwinism not know? Surely Intelligent Design has won…
1:25:55 - Dawkins claims that an advanced civilization evolved through Darwinism and then could have “seeded” this planet with life. Dawkins is only against God as an intelligent designer.
1:28:33 - In a speech, Stein says that “America is all about freedom”, and that the freedom to impose intelligent design as a legitimate theory in the scientific community is an essential right of the people!
1:28:53 - Stein basically mirrors his own staged speech with Reagan’s memorable speech at the Berlin Wall.
1:30:38 - The audience of handpicked, paid volunteers spontaneously gives a standing ovation. Cause despite having all the charisma of Lt. Reginald Barclay from Star Trek:TNG, his speech was so awe-inspiring.
1:30:58 - Join me in the fight against big science!
1:31:15 - Fin.
——-
All in all, the directing quality (never mind the content) was on par with Uwe Boll and perhaps even worse than this; Stein resorted to using staid black and white movie clips to try to illustrate his point, but it just came off as propagandistic and disingenuous. In any case, going back to my previous post, here’s how the drinking teams scored:
1ST PLACE: Team Academic Freedom - 00:00 to 15:02, 39:31 to 57:22, 1:15:57 to 1:22:41, 1:28:33 to 1:31:15 = 35:35 total
2ND PLACE: Team Lightning-Hitting-A-Pond - 15:02 to 39:02, 1:22:41 to 1:28:33 = 28:52 total
3RD PLACE: Team Liberal/Communist Conspiracy - 41:29 to 1:00:52, 1:06:28 to 1:13:21 = 26:26 total
4TH PLACE: Team Hitler - 1:00:52 to 1:15:57 = 15:05 total
Yeah, I was disappointed that Team Hitler lost too.
When is this coming out on DVD? I can’t wait to play the Expelled drinking game at home!
I did sort of same thing. Punching little quips into my Blackberry is the only thing that made the movie bearable. I bought a ticket to Harold and Kumar to see it.
I had to see it because we hosted a speaker at AAR@UCI, Francisco Ayala, who Stein tried to trick into speaking at the Crystal Cathedral (big gawdy megachurch down here in the OC.)
There was an article about it in the NY Times.
Ben(jamin) Stein with his ‘Expelled’ is under heavy artillery for ‘exaggerating’ or ‘going easy’ on the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the ‘Politics-is-applied-biology’ Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous German Ernst Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871. If Thomas Henry Huxley with his concept of ‘agnostism’ was Darwins bulldog in England, Haeckel was his Rotweiler in Germany. Haeckel was also the first one to propose a systematic answer to the Judenfrage: To EXPEL all the Jews from their chairs at the universities.
Here’s my 50-page analysis of the evolutionary genocide and infanticide, plus inserts from the final chapter scanned from an evolutionist scholar D. Gasman from his The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (chapter 7, Gasman 1971, new edition in 2004):
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm
pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (M.Sci. Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm
Well, folks, I never thought I’d get to say this in my lifetime, but it looks like we have a troll! Finally, a small hint of sweet success.
*sniff* Never thought I’d see the day…
[…] somehow I made it my mission to refute every argument made by this piece of crap, per the notes I had taken down on my post “Liveblogging Expelled: NIA”. The horror! 00:42 - Ben Stein […]
It’s time to put this superstition behind us so we can evolve these superstitious people will keep us in the dark ages if we don’t show them different. The funny part of this god thing is that he needs more money than all the governments of the world but let’s his children STARVE every day. That’s your loving god that is letting this happen, he’s telling the pope and the preachers to keep the money and let the kids Starve. Just because these children are born in SIN, but they want our money to save these children and 5% of what we give goes to the children the rest goes to the church. So these religions need to tell the truth and come clean about the help that they do. Especially these televangelists that are stealing from our poor old people that are getting prayed into your heaven. Ben Stein’s grandpaw wasn’t a monkey, he was a JACKASS!!!!!