I saw a documentary last weekend on TV in which Ben Stein tries fruitlessly to make a case for Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design for those of you who have been on another planet looking for the origin of life or a good five cent cigar is the religious right’s attempt to hijack science in the name of Creationism.
The big problem with the film isn’t the message, which is just flat out baloney, but the blundering, bludgeoning manner in which it is mis-delivered. The film intersperses interviews with teachers who have been refused permission to teach creationism in public schools, with shots of Nazi’s herding Jews into concentration camps and people trying to escape over the Berlin wall. The message being ruthlessly hammered home is that by refusing to allow these teachers to teach what is actually religion we are somehow trampling on their rights. This message is, of course, a lie. The teaching of religion in public schools is forbidden by the constitution as part of the separation of church and state. Creationism is a religious not a scientific interpretation of the evolution of species. By forbidding it’s teaching we are actually protecting freedom of religion. If you don’t understand this send me a comment and I will explain it in one-syllable words.
The point of this mish mash is that Darwinists are trying to crush all other scientific thought on the origins of life. This only proves that the clowns who made this film haven’t read Darwin. Darwin says nothing about the origins of life. What he deals with is the origin and development of species. These are quite different things. No sentient person can really claim to know the origin of life on this or any other planet and as soon as someone claims to know about the origin of life they lose all scientific credibility, True there are theories out the wazoo, but none have come even close to proof. Interspersing his interviews with bad film clips from old movies only shows that the filmmaker has some knowledge of the history of film, even as he knows nothing about the history of the planet and has no scientific basis for anything he has to say.
Stein’s logic is so poorly developed that he tries to draw a parallel between Darwinism and Nazism. To do this he tries to say that eugenics, as espoused by the Darwinians is the same eugenics that that provided the Nazis the excuse for genocide. This is nonsense. Eugenics has nothing to do with natural selection. Eugenics is all about controlled selection to create a specific goal, like killing all the dark haired babies to create a nation of blondes. Evolution is about random selection governed by the natural survival of the fittest concept. Unfortunately Stein didn’t even understand this basic concept. Maybe he did understand it, maybe he just ignored it because it didn’t fit into his story line.
The film ends with a series of rabble-rousing speeches set against the pictorial destruction of the Berlin wall backed by a dramatic sound track that brings to mind a religious revival meeting, the complete antithesis of any kind of intellectual investigation and the perfect model for a fundamentalist religious service.