Reponse to Scientific American

Last week I critiqued an interview of Ben Stein. I will now respond to the following article concerning the movie:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know

1. Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust.

This may be true, but who can deny that Hitler and Eugenists like Margaret Sanger were able to use evolution in their propaganda to sway people into their way of thinking. On the other hand, someone could use the Bible to justify wiping out civilizations because of the conquest of Canaan. But nowhere in the Bible does it say that we should do this today. I say, “Let God be true and every man a liar.” The film repeatedly stated that belief in evolution does not necessarily lead one to become a Nazi or a eugenicist.

2. Ben Stein's speech to a crowded auditorium in the film was a setup. So what. When I watched it, I didn’t think that he was really speaking to a real audience.

I can’t see that he intended for people think that he really did. This was just an introduction to the subject matter of the movie, that’s all. Even if Stein could not get a real audience to give him the applause that the audience of mostly extras did, this has nothing to do with truthfulness of the movie. The truth is the truth no matter how few people believe it.

3. Scientists in the film thought they were being interviewed for a different movie.

Even if Ben Stein “tricked” these God-haters into being interviewed for a film that was pro-ID, what does that matter? They said what they said. They didn’t have in their contracts a stipulation that it couldn’t be this way.

4. The ID-sympathetic researcher whom the film paints as having lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution was never an employee there.

Even if this is true, there were many other examples of pro-evolution bias against pro-ID researcher in academia. One of the university administrators clearly admitted that someone was “let go” because they didn’t want the university to be associated with ID theory.

5. Science does not reject religious or "design-based" explanations because of dogmatic atheism.

They say:

Actually, science avoids design explanations for natural phenomena out of logical necessity. The scientific method involves rigorously observing and experimenting on the material world. It accepts as evidence only what can be measured or otherwise empirically validated (a requirement called methodological naturalism). That requirement prevents scientific theories from becoming untestable and overcomplicated. I reject this explanation.

But scientists use qualitative evidence to validate theories all of the time. I reject the idea that intelligent design is not testable. The more we study science, the more find that it is more complex than we thought. But I can’t see how ID theory is any more complicated than evolution. The truth is the truth—you can always come up with a rationale for believing anything, but that does not make it true. There are creationists working on ways to quantify (objectively measure) complexity and information. Remember that entropy (or lack of order) was once only a qualitative concept, but scientists developed away to measure it. I will talk more about this next week when I respond to Scientific American’s 15 Answer’s to Creationist Nonsense.

They say:

By those standards, design-based explanations rapidly lose their rigor without independent scientific proof that validates and defines the nature of the designer. Without it, design-based explanations rapidly become unhelpful and tautological: "This looks like it was designed, so there must be a designer; we know there is a designer because this looks designed."

The above statement in quotation marks is not tautological. A tautological statement would be, “This looks like it was designed, so there must be a designer; we know there is a designer (of all things) therefore it is designed.” (This is also circular reasoning.) The point is (that is, what ID theory is claiming is) , nothing that “looks designed” has ever been observed to have spontaneously arose out of something that does not “look designed”.

They say:

A major scientific problem with proposed ID explanations for life is that their proponents cannot suggest any good way to disprove them. ID "theories" are so vague that even if specific explanations are disproved, believers can simply search for new signs of design. Consequently, investigators do not generally consider ID to be a productive or useful approach to science.

But if there is a designer, and evolutionary processes are not the explanation for the existence of all living things, then scientists could be lead to false conclusions and waste much effort trying to find something that isn’t there. (An example of this is looking for neutrinos from the sun. The few if any real neutrinos that have been found fall far short of what the accepted naturalistic view of the formation of the sun requires.) There are several other examples in which the creationist view makes a certain prediction (opposite of the evolutionary prediction) and the creationist turned out to be right. It seems like evolutionist say that whenever something is a phenomena or anomaly, there must always be an explanation for it that hasn’t been found yet. But then they use this same reasoning to (incorrectly) argue against creationism. I have never heard of any finding that wouldn’t have happened if the assumption that all life evolved from a single organism hadn’t been made.

6) Many evolutionary biologists are religious and many religious people accept evolution.

So what. There are many bloodthirsty killers, rapists, and thieves who are religious. That doesn’t make them real Christians and it doesn’t make them right. Pope John Paul II is the leader of an apostate religion that does not follow God’s Word.

They say:

Nevertheless, the film is wrong to imply that understanding of evolution inevitably or necessarily leads to a rejection of religious belief.

This isn’t what the film is implying. It’s more like this—evolution is a religious belief.