First Word

In the documentary called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the droll Ben Stein flies to all the corners of Christendom to find out why Darwinists have a death-lock on university employment, and why even the most tentative and open-ended questioning of the regnant paradigm leads to termination of employment and black-listing. A number of victims tell their tale; on the other side, Stein interviews several Darwinists — including the godfather of aggressive atheistic evolution, Richard Dawkins — that are unapologetic about their academic hegemony.

The team on the outs consists of advocates of “Intelligent Design” (ID), not creationists. The distinction between these two is spelled out: creationists presuppose the Bible, and try to retrofit science into the biblical view, while ID’ers presuppose nothing, but make arguments from evidence that certain features of living organisms imply design, and cannot be accounted for by chance.

The complaint of the film is with respect to freedom, not truth. Intelligent Design deserves a place at the table, not because it is true, but because it is plausible. On the other hand, Stein makes it crystal clear that he is not about bringing Christ into the classroom. Far from it. Indeed, he strongly implies that he would oppose that just as much as the Darwinists do. There should not be freedom to bring Christ into the classroom, any more than the freedom to teach that the earth is flat, or to deny the holocaust. But apart from such absurdities as those, freedom should reign, and thus the Darwinist hegemony is not just.

Stein rests his case for the academic plausibility of the ID thesis on two points: (1) the lack of explanatory power of Darwinism to account for the origin of life, and (2) that Darwinism leads to the abuses of Nazism, especially eugenics.

For (1), the complexity of the living cell is explained. The cell is the smallest unit of life; and it is indeed a universe onto itself that no sane man could believe was brought about by a lightning flash in the primordial ooze. Stein gets the Darwinists a-stammering on this question. More than one actually speculate that aliens may have seeded the earth with the cell from which everything else then evolved.

For (2), Stein travels to a sanitarium in Germany where eugenics was practiced for a time during National Socialism. He argues that killing people unworthy of life was a consequence of the Darwinist world view.

In evaluating the theme of the movie, it must be observed that anyone versed in the history of philosophical theology will instantly recognize that the “intelligent design” position is simply the classic teleological argument updated in terms of modern biology. It is not new; it is as compelling, or uncompelling as it ever was.

On this, there is plenty of confusion on both sides. Despite Stein’s dismissive gesticulations when the Darwinists appeal to aliens, for example, the notion of aliens planting the seeds from which subsequent life evolved is, upon a little bit of reflection, one possible form agnostic “intelligent design” could take. The aliens would be the “intelligence” who “designed.”

Stein would say that this begs the question: where did the aliens come from? But note that this move shifts the argument from the teleological to something more like the cosmological argument.

But the ID’ers cannot shift to the cosmological argument; that is violating their professed terms. If they are honest, they must admit that (1) the intelligent design could have come from aliens, and (2) they cannot refute this by claiming question-begging, for they cannot, on the basis of evidence, demonstrate that such aliens could not have evolved Darwinianly. They cannot do that, for they have no such evidence to examine, and their whole claim is allegedly based on examination of “the evidence.”

The teleological argument is indeed compelling, as even Immanuel Kant admitted; but what even that great man failed to realize was that the argument is compelling in view of the Christian intuition of rightness that can only be accounted for on the basis of divine revelation. Strip that away, try to base your outlook on ultimate brute fact and the autonomous mind of man, and an appeal to aliens cannot be defeated any more than an appeal to the living and true God.

The Darwinists are therefore quite right to suspect a hidden agenda, despite the protestations of the ID’ers. Either the Darwinist can appeal to the hypothesis of alien seed-planters, or the ID’er has a hidden agenda that he is not being forthright about.

The eugenics argument is also weak. The form is basically this:

if (atheistic Darwinism)
then (no basis for an ethic that would rule out eugenics).

First, he did not have to go to the Third Reich to find examples of eugenic exploitation. He could have gone to, say, various states in the USA that practiced sterilization, starting a few years before the Third Reich. (Oddly enough, German protest of the practice led to its abandonment more quickly during the Third Reich than here, though in fairness one could also add that sterilization was less extreme than euthanasia.)

Second, the Darwinist could answer that eugenics misses the whole point of Darwinism, namely: progress by chance, i.e. unguided, selection. Indeed, it is at least as plausible to suppose that agnostic “intelligent design” would lead to eugenics, since obviously the “design plan” intended healthy, productive lives.

Finally, this entire line of thinking is basically ad populum. Most people probably voice opposition to eugenics mainly because it is currently politically incorrect to say otherwise. Even if it is a genuine intuition, however, on what basis does Stein oppose one intuition with, simply, another intuition? (Remember, a specific God that reveals himself is not allowed in the discussion.)

Occasionally, other little zingers are thrown in. At one point, Stein asks Dawkins an extended series of questions: does he reject Jehovah? (Yes.) All the Hindu gods? (Yes.) Allah? (Yes.) And so forth. Finally Dawkins becomes frustrated, and rightly so. What Stein is doing apparently is a “judo argument.” The Enlightenment argued that the probability is small, given the plethora of conflicting claims about the deity, that any particular claim is valid. Stein is apparently trying to turn that argument around, as if to ask, what is the probably of all these deities being false? But Stein’s question presupposes the Enlightenment foundation: given that man’s mind is independent and seeking ultimate answers in the flux of darkness and contingency, my probability of the set union is better than your small probability of the particular set member. Stein’s approach is indeed hopeless obscurantism; on the ultimate foundation that he shares with Dawkins — of legislative man that cannot hear any god clearly –, Dawkins’ position is indeed the slightly less irrational.

The main appeal of the film — an ode to “freedom” — is historically untenable.

Academic freedom has never existed, really. Historically, universities were originally founded by Christians for specific theological purposes, and excluded those that would teach something destructive to that purpose. Where the “enemies” took over, whether it should be Protestants in Saxony after Luther, or “liberals” at Harvard then Yale then Princeton, the new regime was always just as jealous to guard their monopoly as the old.

“Free speech” was a ruse used as a siege-work, first by Communists, then, half a century later, by 60’s radicals; once in power, there was less free speech than before the coup.

It is amazing to me how conservatives have adopted the rhetoric of the Communist method of sedition, as if it were ever the case. The university was simply never founded to “hire the smartest people that exist” and “let them debate the issues to a resolution.” Academic debate is, and always has been in terms of a carefully circumscribed framework that is presupposed and acted in terms of.

Along with this, Benny should ask himself why it is, that only Christendom has produced great universities.

Darwinists won their position of unassailable power, not by free speech and debate, but “fair and square” in terms of their worldview — by stealth, back-stabbing, intrigue, and pluck.

We should not beg for a place in the far corner of the banquet table they have set.

The caricature of “creationism” must also be challenged. A true, vantillian creationism, argued for elsewhere on this site, challenges the very possibility of science itself apart from God’s self-revelation. Thus,

no creationism -> no science

This is why we can say that agnostic science is ultimately impossible, and rests on borrowed capital. The real pith of the matter is no more welcome in Stein’s little exploitative universe than it is in the Darwinist’s. Let’s fight it out honestly, and not whine that everyone should have a place at the table. The issue is quite a bit more subtle, more foundational and all-encompassing than any concept the Ben-Jew shows evidence of having contemplated.