Expelled

So I usually will watch documentaries at home - I have never actually paid at the movie theatre to go see one. Tonight, we saw Ben Stein's "Expelled" and it was powerful.

Expelled calls attention to the plight of highly credentialed scholars who have been forced out of prestigious academic positions because they proposed Intelligent Design as a possible alternative to Charles Darwin’s 150-year-old theories about the origins of life. Darwin's theory, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God. Instead of entertaining a debate on the merits of competing theories, the scientific establishment has moved to suppress the ID movement in a “systematic and ruthless” way at odds with America’s founding principles, the film asserts. I think it is sad that all other theories on the origin of life get squashed - no matter what! Especially those that even hint at an intelligent 'designer.'

Advocates of the theory of intelligent design see things differently. They think there are discernible features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process like natural selection. They don't dispute that life changes over time; they dispute that undirected processes produced all of that change. Still, many Darwinists charge that intelligent design, or ID, is "creationism in disguise." But the case for ID is based on scientific evidence, not Scripture.

Arguably, ID is friendly to theism, just as Darwinism is friendly to atheism. That is what upsets the fervent atheist Richard Dawkins (a Bilbo Baggins lookalike/soundalike with very bad teeth), who in "Expelled" says he can consider intelligent design as an explanation for the origin of life if it means space aliens brought life to Earth, but could not allow any possibility that God might have had a role in design.

Anyway, keep an open mind, go see the film, pay attention to the definitions and theory, and form your own opinion.

Bruce Chapman wrote, "Precisely because the majority in science has been wrong on note-worthy occasions, progress often does depend on courageous dissenters. The principle is clear: "A fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." So wrote Charles Darwin."