Monday, March 10, 2008

Scare tactic alert

The Intelligent Design Community is eagerly awaiting the release of that boffo documentary exposing the academic cabal surrounding Darwinism (gee maybe I should write for the Discovery Institute), "Expelled", starring that well known scientist Ben Stein.

Since I am clearly in a boffo mood today, I call your attention to the latest buzz. According to the New York Times, Michael Moore he of Sicko fame was dis-invited from a screening of Expelled.


Allegedly, according to the film's promoters, the film has some rough edges and not considered ready for "professional scrutiny". Of course it is ready for screening at various mega church groups who have lost any ability to think critically so rough edges won't bother them so long as the film is appropriately anti evolution and paints evolutionary scientists as totally dogmatic and picking on the poor Intelligent Design Advocates.

What I found interesting is that Stein in commenting about the film says:

“there’s just a lot of people who don’t believe that big science and Darwinism should have a stranglehold on academic life, and they have been waiting for a voice.”

Notice how now there are two enemies. One is Darwinism, but the other is "big science." I suppose that is something like big Church (oops). But the term "big science" perhaps harkens to a more innocent time when scientists labored alone in their labs-that's the type of science the Intelligent Design people do except they don't have labs.

Big science....hmmm yes a lot of science is done on a massive scale and there are certainly a number of reasons for that. Some of that has to do with the complexity of the problems that face us today. But big science- and lets throw in big technology to boot- has been around since the 1930's and is not going away. Anyone read about the Manhattan Project?

Big science-sounds scary but Mr. Stein can pine for the good old days but remember that he and others who use this phrase in a disparaging way are simply trying to avoid applying critical thinking to understanding the world around them. They don't want to because critical thinking would show the weakness in the Intelligent Design idea and that would mean no one would go see his film.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Ben Stein is obviously willing to shill for anything that adds to the stock of "Ben Stein's Money." For a Jew to invoke the Holocaust and Stalin's brutal regiime and to equate Nazis and atheists with murder because of evolutionary is unconscionable and unacceptable on so many levels, I can't even list them. Not to mention CRAZY!