Review and Reflections on "Expelled"

Today, Pastor ROC and I went to preview the Ben Stein documentary, Expelled, which revolves around the continuing debate between Darwinists and those who subscribe to the intelligent design theory. I blogged about the movie sometime ago.

I am giving it four out of a possible five stars. It was a bit slow starting out, but brought it home in the end. However, I will wait until it comes out on DVD to introduce it to my students because some of the dialogue was a bit too scholarly and would quickly be lost on most kids in the context of the movie theater. Half of them would be texting about the Iron Man preview twenty minutes in. Make no mistake though, the movie was extremely compelling.

The film follows the stories of how highly credentialed university professors and research scientists have lost their jobs for simply entertaining the thought that intelligent design could possibly explain things that Darwin's evolutionary theories could not.

The director and editors did a masterful job of weaving the storyline with images from the Berlin Wall (drawing comparison to the ways in which Darwinian scientists disallow other ideas and thoughts from entering their theories on the origin of life) and images from Hitler's Third Reich (comparing Darwin's "survival of the fittest" concepts with Hitler's goals of "cleansing the human race".)

There were a few things that characterized the evolution camp. One was that they had absolute disdain for religion, more specifically, the Christian God. One individual (a Tennessean no less) told the sad story of how he had been a person of faith until he went to college and was challenged by a biology professor. He subsequently denounced God and came to the conclusion that when life ends you are simply gone- ceasing to exist. Another leading voice on the evolution side was Richard Dawkins, the celebrated British atheist and author of the best selling book, The God Delusion. He had a some venom to spew about God, too. But then when Ben Stein pressed him for a theory on how life began, he came up with a really interesting theory.

This was news to me, but apparently there is a seed theory. It states that intelligent beings from another galaxy might have come to earth at some point in the past and "planted the seeds of life here." Talk about your leap of faith! Are you kidding me? You scoff at the idea of the Judeo-Christian God, yet you have enough faith to believe that aliens came to plant life on earth. Utterly ridiculous.

The bottom line is that learned people try to prop themselves up with enough smoke and mirror theories so that they do not have to believe that there is a God who is the ultimate authority in the universe and from whom comes absolute truth. This would mean the underpinnings of their miserable lives would be jerked out from under them and they would have to face the consequences of their actions. The sad part is that these views will continue to find footing so long as open debate on evolution vs. intelligent design is quelled by the scientific and media establishment.