Expelled — the review’s up!

Last updated on: April 24, 2008 at 8:49 am by Peter T. Chattaway

Expelled — the review’s up! 2008-04-24T08:49:00-07:00 Peter T. Chattaway

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My review of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is now up at BC Christian News. I feel a bit bad about being as critical of the film as I am, since the people involved have been pretty nice and have fed me well both times I saw the film — but the film is what it is, and I have to approach the film the same way I would approach, say, a major Hollywood movie that I had seen on an expenses-paid junket. I ultimately have to respond to what is on the screen.

For what it’s worth, there are any number of points I would have liked to address in this review but had to leave out for word-count reasons.

First, I have problems with the way the film harps on the theme of “academic freedom”. On the surface — and given the film’s heavy metaphorical use of the Berlin Wall and the speech made there by Ronald Reagan — this sounds like an attempt to resolve scientific matters through political sloganeering. (Note also the shot that zooms in on the word “Creator” in the American Declaration of Independence.) But the fact is, there are limits to all our freedoms — the freedom of expression is constrained by laws against libel, slander and yelling “fire!” in crowded theatres, for example — and there are scientific standards that all scientists must meet if they want their theories to be taken seriously within a scientific context. It is not at all clear that Intelligent Design theorists have met those standards, and this film doesn’t even try to demonstrate that ID is scientifically valid as a theory; it offers no clue as to what sorts of testable or falsifiable hypotheses ID theorists have proposed, if any.

Now, I don’t mean to disparage or diminish the experiences of those scientists who have found themselves “expelled”, fairly or unfairly, from the scientific establishment. Given the recent ostracizing of Larry Summers and James D. Watson for comments they made about alleged natural differences between genders and races — ostracizing that, in Watson’s case, prompted William Saletan to say that the “liberals” in academia were being wilfully dogmatic just like “creationists” — no one could deny that politics plays a heavy role in academia, even among supposedly rational and objective scientists. And there is certainly a double-standard if some scientists are being slapped down for expressing their belief in a Creator while other scientists, like Richard Dawkins, are allowed to run around promoting their atheism and their hatred of religion.

But the fundamental question remains: Is ID science? Expelled never really bothers to make the case that it is. But if this case can’t be made, then there is no more place for ID in the science classroom than there is for any number of other non-scientific theories. There is, presumably, a reason why astronomy and not astrology is studied in the science classroom. What is it? And why should ID fall into the same category as astronomy and not astrology? Likewise, there is, presumably, a reason why medical techniques and not miraculous healings are studied in the science classroom. What is it? I believe in miracles myself, and I am deeply impressed by the way Catholics, in particular, will often subject claims of miraculous healings to rigorous scientific analysis, considering all possible natural causes before they turn to supernatural ones. But to make that leap — to assert that an as-yet-unexplained phenomenon must have been caused by supernatural forces — is essentially to leap beyond science and thus, in some sense, outside of science.

Second, there is a line in the film that I find very intriguing, when David Berlinski, an agnostic Jewish mathematician and a self-professed “crank” who sort-of falls on the ID side of the argument, says, “We don’t even know what a species is!” That is a fascinating statement, and I wish the film had teased out its implications. Why did scientists invent the term “species” in the first place? What do they mean by it? What don’t they mean by it? What sort of discussions is the term useful for? What are its limits? And how can old-school creationists argue that no new species has ever emerged from an older one if, in fact, we don’t even know what a species is in the first place? It is the creationists, after all, and not the evolutionists who have insisted that there are clear uncrossable boundaries between the various “species”.

As it is, Berlinski’s line points up one of the other problems I have with ID, at least as it has been presented to the public, and that is the way that ID seems to consist more of tearing hypotheses down rather than building them up. It’s all well and good to encourage skepticism, to point at the gaps in existing theories, or to underscore the fact that words don’t always mean what we think they mean. But at some point you need to agree on a common language, and you need to propose a hypothesis that can be tested and applied like any other scientific hypothesis. And if ID theorists are actually doing that, films like Expelled don’t really clue us in.

More thoughts later, if any occur to me.

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