Down the Rabbit Hole of Intelligent Design

The intelligent design folks have latched on to the success of documentaries such as Inconvenient Truth and Sicko with their own effort to show how close minded scientists are to new ideas. In the sort of inversion that has become old hat in the ID movement, Ben Stein (YES....that Ben Stein) has a documentary called GetExpelled. The movie's trailer starts out with Stein writing "Do not question Darwinism" over and over again in a biology lecture room's black board. Hmmm I must have given him detention.

The movie's blog and web site imply that Stein is some sort of rebel against the close minded scientific establishment and visitors are encouraged to join the GetExpelled community. Of course, the rest of the trailer attempts to darkly imply that there is some sort of dark conspiracy against intelligent design. Mr. Stein considers it his duty to warn us about this conspiracy.

Slick- just the sort of thing to appeal to some young people who with no sense of history might not get Mr. Stein's inversion of history. For rather than being young turks with new ideas fighting against the evil scientific establishment, the Intelligent Designers are backing an archaic way of viewing the universe which is still entrenched in the popular mind. It is the evolutionists and natural scientists who have the new ideas. Maybe to the ahistorical young evolution seems to be the establishment position, but it is not.

Get Expelled looks like another inversion of reality, an inversion worthy of Lewis Carroll where critical thinking gets demonized and irrationality becomes the way science should work.

Oh and according to Scientific American Ben Stein has won the The Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth. Liberty and Truth? Now there is a real inversion for you.