Your View: It's easy to refute Stein's farce of a documentary

May 03, 2008 07:55 pm

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The April 26 “Our View” about “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," while professing to be neither in support of nor against the movie, unfortunately tips its hand twice while calling the theory of evolution “creator-unfriendly” and “Darwinian orthodoxy.”
As it is not religious it is neither, but to those who rely on oversimplifications, argumentative fallacies, and straw men it can be seen as such. One need only look to the writings (easily found via Google) of scientists and Christians like Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins (the lead of the Human Genome Project) to see that it is not. If nothing else, pick up the book “Finding Darwin’s God” by Ken Miller for a well-written perspective.
Stein’s farce of a “documentary” is easily refuted, and very poorly done. The discrimination that he states occurred, did not. Many of the interviews happened under false pretenses.
The truth is, that it has been discussed in scientific circles, attempts to do research into it have been attempted and refuted as science cannot speculate on the supernatural. Science can only make statements based on the observable world. Contrary to the claims in “Expelled,” the details of Evolutionary Theory are hotly discussed amongst biologists. Charles Darwin would barely recognize his theory were he alive today. But yet, his general model stands, fields of science such as genetics, which did not exist at the same time that Darwin was alive, have only supported the framework that he proposed over 150 years ago. The title should not be “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", but “Flunked - No Intelligence Shown.”