What, exactly, is intelligent design
theory? How is it different than creationism? Why should scientists take it as
seriously as evolution theory? It's reasonable to expect Expelled: No
Intelligence Allowed, an intelligent-design documentary starring and co-written by
former Nixon speechwriter, game-show host, and "Bueller, Bueller" guy Ben
Stein, to address these basic questions with at least a modicum of depth. No
such luck. Instead, Expelled is a classic bait-and-switch, presenting itself as
a plea for freedom in the scientific marketplace of ideas, while actually
delivering a grossly unfair, contradictory, and ultimately repugnant attack on
Darwinists, whose theory of life is first described, in frustratingly vague
terms, as "unintelligible" and "a room full of smoke," then as a pathway to
atheism, and finally as a Nazi justification for the Holocaust.
Stein's assertion in Expelled is that the academic
establishment routinely silences scientists who believe in intelligent design,
stripping them of university tenureships, jobs, and their good reputations. ID,
Stein says, isn't merely a cockamamie scheme to shoehorn creationism back into
science, but a serious academic theory with no ties to religion. (Though, in
the film's typically muddled fashion, Stein also argues that ID might provide
insight into God.) Even for those who buy into the idea that intelligent design
is a legitimate scientific theory, Expelled offers little substantive
illumination. Director Nathan Frankowski relies instead on superficial,
hand-me-down Michael Moore cutesiness like'50s educational-movie parodies,
kiddie animations, and jokey cheap shots to not-so-subtly portray innocuously
tweedy scientists as eveeel, mustache-twirling baddies bent on furthering a
worldview that supposedly favors destroying religion and coldly doing away with
the weak and disabled.
Expelled stacks the deck in favor
of intelligent design, interviewing the most rational-seeming and articulate
proponents, and the crustiest, most arrogant critics, but that's to be expected
from a hot-button documentary in the post-Moore era. But when Stein—whose
disingenuous babe-in-the-woods routine grows more grating with every wronged
talking head he pretends to be shocked over—walks through Dachau's Nazi
death camp and wonders whether "survival of the fittest" thinking could lead to
future atrocities at the hands of sociopathic Darwinists, he strides proudly
over the last line of decency in contemporary documentary filmmaking. Surely
there's a more nuanced argument to be made in favor of ID than pinning the old
"bad as Hitler" canard on pro-evolution scientists? Perhaps what Bruce Chapman
of ID advocacy group The Discovery Institute says about Darwinists applies best
to Expelled:
"People who don't have an argument are reduced to throwing sand in your eyes."
If only this movie could be washed away as easily.