Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
According to Ben Stein, "Evil can sometimes be rationalized as science." Expelled reveals the ways that evil can be rationalized and disguised as argument and intellectual inquiry, too. That may seem extreme, but the ideas presented, the sorts of sloppy arguments made, and the twisted rhetoric used in this movie are dangerous and have the
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2. Both you and Ben Stein have incomplete ideas about the relationship between science and religion over the course of history. They did not simply happily coexist (some scientific inquiry was stifled and some scientists punished, even killed, if it didn't agree with the Church's teachings), but neither was there "nothing but constant conflict between science and religion." Many major scientific thinkers were themselves religious. Most of the conflict arose, as far as I can tell, between the organizations of religion and certain elements of science, not between religious belief itself as a private matter and the practice of science.
3. "Darwinism does lead to atheism" is simply incorrect. Stein interviews Richard Dawkins, who says that for him an understanding of evolutionary biology led to atheism. He is a good example of how it can lead to atheism. Perhaps it even should lead to atheism. I am not opposed to that argument. But it is a logical fallacy to say that it does lead to atheism. There is not a straight causal line running from Darwinism (or evolutionary biology) to atheism. Not all evolutionary biologists are atheists and not all atheists are evolutionary biologists. It is Stein's twisting of logic and the just plain icky conclusions he draws from this twisting of logic that bothers me, not the idea that a better understanding of how the world works through science might make it easier for people to let go of "magic god fairies."
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