Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008)

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the movie, opened yesterday across America. I watched the last showing of the day with friends in Findley, Ohio. It was an extremely thoughtful and thought-provoking film. It was a documentary in format. It captured both comedian Ben Stein’s striking search for truth and academic and scientific freedom. It also documented big science, the main stream media, government agencies, and the academia elites' frightening fear of the truth on this nation’s campuses and research labs. These two opposing worldviews or approaches served as themes, central core or message of the movie.

Expelled is essentially an exposé on the current state of affairs of the lack of academic freedom and the pronounced bias that is rampant in science, schools and government agencies in 2008. Political correctness trumps the uninhibited and open pursuit of the truth in many if not all disciplines, especially “science.”

What is happening in America has happened elsewhere, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union are two forerunners. Silencing and rejecting the truth despite the facts are the modus operandi. Here are some key questions illustrative of the dilemma we are faced with today. Why can’t there be an open dialogue regarding the origin of life? Why can’t the topic of intelligent design be even broached without danger of loss of one’s job, tenure and/or reputation? Evolution is a mere theory and a very flawed one at that, so why must it be the foundation for all scientific research and academic thought? Why would more credence be given to an extraterrestrial life forms birthing life on earth than recognition of a Creator?

Some of these questions are raised in this serious study of the sad state of affairs in so-called science and academia today. The movie movingly portrays the complicity of the academia, the media and the courts in establishing and supporting the current severe academic restrictions on thought and expression. Our colleges are gulags instead of the freedom factories, which they deceptively tout themselves to be. This imprisonment and censorship of ideas may be one of the reasons for our second-class status when it comes to much of what is pawned off as “education” today.

Expelled does make you think. It compares this issue of what is going on in our schools and institutions to the restrictions and invisible shackles placed on blacks which necessitated and birthed the civil rights movement. Blacks were not free to pursue their dreams. Likewise, today, scientists, professors and teachers are not free to pursue certain politically incorrect avenues of study or research. They are actually censored and discriminated against when they do pursue their dreams or the truth. Expelled concludes that the issue of present-day academic imprisonment is also a matter of rights and freedom that now needs to also be overcome.

RATING

Expelled has pure entertainment value. However, it is not a feel-good, brainless feature. It also dares to educate the viewer to one of the basic hindrances to the pursuit of excellence and truth in America. It shows the damage that the institutionalization of intellectual dishonesty and political correctness causes at the expense of a free and open pursuit of the truth has on America.

I rate the movie a ***** out of *****. It is an honest, professional, sincere, accurate and well-documented pursuit of the truth. Expelled does a fine job presenting both sides of this debate. It is meant to inform and to challenge the thinking of every American who loves this country and is interested in preserving its greatness, which is embodied in its freedoms. I urge you to see this outstanding movie, bring your family and friends to it, and/or tell your friends about it.