Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a 2008 American propaganda film directed by Nathan Frankowski and starring Ben Stein. It is presented as a documentary promoting the conspiracy theory that academia oppresses and excludes people who believe in intelligent design. It portrays the scientific theory of evolution as a contributor to communism, fascism, atheism, eugenics, and in particular Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust. Although intelligent design is a pseudoscientific religious idea, the film presents it as science-based, without giving a detailed definition of the concept or attempting to explain it on a scientific level. Other than briefly addressing issues of irreducible complexity, Expelled examines intelligent design purely as a political issue.
Expelled opened in 1,052 movie theaters, more than any other documentary before it, and grossed over $2,900,000 in its first weekend. It earned $7.7 million, making it the 33rd highest-grossing documentary film in the United States.
Media response to the film has been largely negative. Multiple reviews, including those of USA Today and Scientific American, described the film as propaganda, with USA Today adding that it was "a political rant disguised as a serious commentary on stifled freedom of inquiry" and Scientific American calling it "a science-free attack on Darwin". The New York Times deemed it "a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry" and "an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike". Response to the film from conservative Christian groups was generally positive, praising the film for its humor and for focusing on what they perceive as a serious issue.
Overview
The film was directed by Nathan Frankowski and stars Ben Stein. Stein provides narrative commentary throughout the film. He is depicted as visiting a sequence of universities to interview proponents of intelligent design who claim to have been victimized, and evolutionary scientists who are presented as atheists. The film makes considerable use of vintage film clips, including opening scenes showing the Berlin Wall being constructed as a metaphor for barriers to the scientific acceptance of intelligent design. The film takes aim at some scientific hypotheses of the origin of life, and presents a short animation portraying the inner workings of the cell to introduce the intelligent design concept of irreducible complexity, the claim that such complexity could not arise from spontaneous mutations. The intelligent design proponents shown include Richard Weikart, who claims that Darwinism influenced the Nazis. The film also associates Adolf Hitler's ambitions of a master race and the Holocaust to Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest. It does so using stock footage film clips of Nazi concentration camp laboratories, as well as statements of sociologist Uta George, director of the Hadamar killing centre's Memorial Museum. The film directly addresses intelligent design only superficially, focusing on how it is treated in academia rather than on issues involving the concept itself. It makes almost no attempt to define intelligent design or show any scientific evidence in favor of intelligent design. Instead, the film deals with the subject almost entirely from a political, rather than scientific, viewpoint.Promotion of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution
The film depicts intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, and claims it deserves a place in academia. This "design theory" is defined in the film by the Discovery Institute's Paul Nelson as "the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as a result of intelligence". Stein says in the film that intelligent design is not taught or researched in academia because it is "suppressed in a systematic and ruthless fashion". The National Center for Science Education, one of the groups discussed in the film, responds that "Intelligent design has not produced any research to suppress", and "The fundamental problem with intelligent design as science is that intelligent design claims cannot be tested."In the United States federal court case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, intelligent design was judged a repackaged version of creationism and as such introducing intelligent design in public school science classrooms was unconstitutional religious infringement. In the film, the president of the Discovery Institute, Bruce Chapman, denied that teaching intelligent design in science classes is an attempt to sneak religion into public schools. Stein, the Discovery Institute and Expelleds publicist, Motive Entertainment, have all used the film to build support for Academic Freedom bills in various states.
These bills would permit educators in the public schools to independently introduce criticisms of or alternatives to evolution, but many view the bills as the latest in a series of anti-evolutionary strategies designed to bring creationism into the classroom.
Claims that intelligent design advocates are persecuted
The film contends that there is widespread persecution of educators and scientists who promote intelligent design, and a conspiracy to keep God out of the nation's laboratories and classrooms. The film contains interviews with educators and scientists in which they describe this persecution. In the film, Stein says, "It's not just the scientists who are in on it. The media is in on it, the courts, the educational system, everyone is after them." Stein further accuses academia of having a dogmatic commitment to Darwinism, comparable to the 'party line' of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education stated that the filmmakers were exploiting Americans' sense of fairness as a way to sell their religious views and that she feared that the film would portray "the scientific community as intolerant, as close-minded, and as persecuting those who disagree with them. And this is simply wrong."Portrayal of evolutionary science as atheistic
The film alleges that many scientists and the scientific enterprise are dogmatically committed to atheism, and that a commitment to materialism in the scientific establishment is behind the claimed suppression of intelligent design.William A. Dembski addressed the issue of design explanations in science, saying that "many fields of study involve intelligent design, including archaeology, forensics, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. An archaeologist, for example, examines the evidence—like a curiously shaped stone—to determine whether it might be the product of a human intelligence." Stein contends that "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can't possibly touch a higher power, and it can’t possibly touch God."
Scientific American criticised the film for failing to note that the scientific method deals only with explanations that can be tested or empirically validated, and so logically cannot use untestable religious or "design based" explanations.
The National Center for Science Education criticizes the film for the fallacy of composition: representing scientists who are atheists as representative of all scientists, without discussing the many prominent scientists who are religious, and thus creating a false dichotomy between science and religion. The associate producer of the film, Mark Mathis, said that although he didn't get to decide who and what interviews made it into the film, it was his opinion that including Roman Catholic biologist Kenneth R. Miller would have "confused the film unnecessarily". Mathis also questioned the intellectual honesty of a Catholic accepting evolution. Miller later noted that 40% of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science profess belief in a personal God.
In its review, the Waco Tribune-Herald said "That's the real issue of Expelled — atheist scientists versus God — even though it wholly undercuts statements by intelligent design researchers early in the film that ID has nothing to do with religion." It described the failure to cover "how Christian evolutionists reconcile faith and science" as "perhaps the film's most glaring and telling omission", and said that the film rather "quickly dismissed by a chain of quotes that brand them as liberal Christians and duped by militant atheists in their efforts to get religion out of the classroom". Defending the film, the producer, Walt Ruloff, said that scientists like prominent geneticist Francis Collins keep their religion and science separate because they are "toeing the party line". Collins, who was not asked to be interviewed for the film in any of its incarnations, called Ruloff's claims "just ludicrous".
Claims that the theory of evolution was necessary for the development of Nazism
Richard Weikart, a historian and Discovery Institute fellow, appears in the film asserting that Charles Darwin's work in the 19th century influenced Adolf Hitler. He argues that Darwin's perception of humans not being qualitatively different from animals, with qualities such as morality arising from natural processes, undermines what Weikart calls the "Judeo-Christian conception of the sanctity of human life". Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps figure highly in the narrative of the film. In the film, philosopher and Discovery Institute fellow David Berlinski says that Darwinism was a "necessary though not sufficient" cause for the Holocaust, and Uta George, director of the Hadamar Memorial in Germany, says that "the Nazis, they relied on Darwin. Yes, and German scientists."Scientific American editor John Rennie wrote that the film repeatedly uses the term "Darwinism" instead of evolution to misportray science as though it were a "dogmatic, atheistic ideology".
Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in his MSNBC column that the film is a "frighteningly immoral narrative", including "a toxic mishmash of persecution fantasies, disconnected and inappropriate references to fallen communist regimes and their leaders and a very repugnant form of Holocaust denial from the monotone big mouth Ben Stein". Caplan sharply criticized what he described as Stein's willingness "to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place — racism — to serve his own ideological end. Expelled indeed."
In an April 7, 2008, interview with Paul Crouch, Jr., on the Trinity Broadcasting Network about the film, Stein said that science had led to the Nazi murder of children, and stated that "Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place. Science leads you to killing people."
On April 29, 2008, the Anti-Defamation League issued the following statement condemning the film's use of the Holocaust:
When Vancouver Sun writer Peter McKnight asked for Stein to comment on the Anti-Defamation League's statement, Stein replied, "It's none of their f---ing business."