The incredibly-punctual Jim West has done an exceptional job putting together the monthly Biblical Studies Carnival for May 2008. Give it a read and see what you might have missed in the merry, merry month of April—a busy month in the biblicablogosphere, as Jim’s carnival entry more than amply attests.

Young-earth creationist organization Answers in Genesis has begun selling an “Expelled Action Kit“:

Have you seen Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed? If not, click the Expelled banner at right to find the nearest theater showing Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Then, take a friend (or better yet, a whole group of friends!) to watch and then discuss it together over pizza or dessert! Do this as soon as possible to help ensure that Ben Stine’s [sic] amazing, much-discredited (by evolutionists!) documentary stays in theaters as long as possible. We urge you to use Expelled as a tool for outreach. We’ve viewed it and agree that it will be a very popular “evolution-busting” tool to expose the lack of academic freedom in America’s schools today. Once you’ve seen Ben Stein you’ll want to equip yourself and help your friends. That’s why we’ve assembled this incredibly low-priced value pack of Creator-affirming materials, plus you’ll even receive an exclusive coupon good for $5 off Expelled here at AnswersBookstore.com as soon as the film is available to us on DVD!

Now here’s the really weird thing about this. Expelled promotes the intelligent design movement. In the movie, Stein interviews several prominent intelligent design advocates, who insist that intelligent design springs from science, not religion, and especially that intelligent design does not depend on or even affirm a historico-scientific reading of the biblical book of Genesis. Prominent design advocates like Michael Behe even explicitly affirm biological evolution except for certain “irreducibly complex” biochemical processes and microbiological structures. Stein et al. devote a whole segment of the movie to arguing that intelligent design is much different from creationism.

Meanwhile, AiG’s “Expelled Action Kit” includes an “Origins Belief Chart,” which AiG describes as follows on the “Action Kit” page:

This 11 x 17 inch wall chart will help you understand how the four most popular origins beliefs—biblical creation, intelligent design, old-earth creation, and molecules-to-man evolution—handle 16 different topics like dinosaurs, fossils, the age of the earth, origin of man, and moral authority.

Note that “biblical creation,” as AiG styles its particular version of young-earth creationism, stands apart from “intelligent design” on AiG’s wall chart. If you follow the link for more information about the “Origins Belief Chart,” you can learn why:

Everyone has a worldview that is shaped by what they believe, but very few people view life from the biblical worldview. What about you? What is the foundation for your worldview?

This chart outlines the four most popular origins beliefs—biblical creation, intelligent design, old-earth creation, and molecules-to-man evolution—and how they view 16 different topics like dinosaurs, fossils, death/disease, and moral authority. Is your worldview based on anything other than the inerrant and authoritative Word of God? Find out today!

In AiG’s “worldview,” only “biblical creation” is truly Christian. Everything else, including “intelligent design,” is some degree of rubbish.

So it boils down to this: if you hurry on over to AiG today, you can buy a wall chart that shows in brief why intelligent design is wrong from a YEC viewpoint, and you get a coupon for $5 off an ID PR movie which AiG plans to sell when available.

Curioser and curioser.

Two years ago, Jeremy Smoak—a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA—presented at WECSOR an interesting paper about “an ancient Israelite wartime curse” exhibited, for example, in Amos 5:11:

Therefore because you trample on the poor
and take from them levies of grain,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
but you shall not live in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
but you shall not drink their wine. (NRSV)

I was delighted to see that Jeremy’s paper has now appeared in the latest Journal of Biblical Literature. I commend the article to your reading—please note that I am not a “prophets guy,” so I’m not entirely well-equipped to assess the argument in full—and remember that “you heard it here first“!

I’m delighted that Pepperdine University has appointed my senior colleague Rick Marrs to be dean of Pepperdine’s undergraduate school, Seaver College. Rick will succeed outgoing dean David Baird, who chose to retire effective the end of this school year. Rick chaired the Religion Division for many years, and in fact Rick’s promotion several years ago to Associate Dean occasioned my appointment to the Seaver College faculty. Rick earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the Johns Hopkins University in 1982 and came to Pepperdine in 1987. Pepperdine’s PR folks have put out a press release with a few additional details.

“Mark Johnson, producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, told SCI FI Wire that the upcoming sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will remain very faithful to author C.S. Lewis’ original book.” Johnson also told Sci Fi Wire that the biggest change from book to movie was the structure: “If you remember, in the book the story of Caspian is told in flashback by Trumpkin [Peter Dinklage] to the four Pevensie kids. We rearranged that. At one point, we have three parallel stories that take us though the first 45 minutes.”

So we now know that Peter Jackson will produce The Hobbit for New Line Cinema, but who will direct? Persistent rumors point to Guillermo del Toro, but no official statement has yet been forthcoming, says Sci Fi Wire.

Sci Fi Wire also reports that a new Dark Knight trailer was shown at the NYC Comic Con on April 19, but it doesn’t appear to be available online yet—that I can find.

I don’t often link to content on Richard Dawkins’s web site, although I read it frequently. However, a post from this past Sunday deserves wide attention. Here’s the background to the story:

On 18th April, the day Ben Stein’s infamous film was released, Michael Shermer received the following letter from a Jew (referencing a past article that Shermer had written debunking the Holocaust deniers) whose identity I shall conceal as “David J”.

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!

Shermer wrote to Mr J to ask if he had by any chance just seen Expelled, and he received this reply:

Yes I have. You know, I respect you as a human being and you have done great work exposing psychics and frauds, but this is a very touchy issue that affects me and family emotionally. Our family business was affected because of Auschwitz because now, our family has nothing. It is gone. Things began to make sense once I saw the movie and I am just appalled. I have learned a lot from Ben Stein, a Jewish brother, who has opened my eyes up a bit.

It seemed to me that Ben Stein and his lying crew were more to blame than Mr J himself for his revolting letter. I therefore decided to write him a personal letter and try to explain a few things to him. It then occurred to me (indeed, Michael Shermer suggested as much) that there are probably many others like him, whose minds have been twisted in this evil way by the man Stein, and that it would be a good idea to publish the letter. I decided to wait 24 hours to see if he would reply, although I didn’t expect him to. I am now publishing my letter to him, exactly as I sent it to him except that I have removed his name.

Richard

Dawkins’s “open letter” to this “Mr J” discusses in some detail—and with some forcefulness—the entire “Darwinism enables Naziism” claim in Expelled. I encourage everyone to read Dawkins’s “open letter” and suggest that discussion thereof take place in the comments thread there—which already stands at 377 comments.

Well, actually I stayed off-campus today partially because I don’t have any finals or meetings today, and partially because I had a few errands to run, such as finding a 9-inch lefty baseball glove for my 4-year-old son (I only found one after searching through five different stores), getting a haircut, and watching Expelled—in approximately that order of importance. In a way, I didn’t really want to give Ben Stein and Premise Media my $8.75 (matinee price in Thousand Oaks!), but I felt that since I have already been critical of the movie’s production and promotion, I had better see the content for myself before I said much more.

I found most of the content of Expelled to be fairly predictable, based on the pre-release news and reviews. My jaw did drop open at a couple of scenes that I had not anticipated, to which I shall come presently.

As I see it, the film basically tries to support four claims. Regular Higgaion readers will find it no surprise that I think Expelled fails to make its case on each point. In fact, I don’t think a successful case can be made for any of the four points, though I know that some Higgaion readers (including at least one GeM who always makes me Grena grin somehow) will disagree with that latter assessment. On the former note, however, I suspect that even staunch intelligent design proponents would have to agree that if there are cases to be made on these four points, Expelled does not make the cases very well. But on this, of course, I cannot speak for anyone but myself.

1. Expelled claims that a Darwinian academic-media-judicial establishment ruthlessly and systematically suppresses discussion of intelligent design. Expelled trots out the usual suspects: Richard (von) Sternberg, Caroline Crocker, Guillermo Gonzalez, Robert Marks, Michael Egnor, and (here’s the surprise contestant) Pamela Winnick. Anybody who has paid close attention to the growth of and resistance to the intelligent design movement has heard all of this before. As you might well imagine, Expelled puts the darkest, most conspiriatorial spin possible on these cases. You can get a good treatment of each “persecution story” at the NCSE’s Expelled Exposed web site. None of these cases are what they are cracked up to be. Since these have been well documented elsewhere, I need not take time to go into the details here.

Of course, Expelled has nothing to say about any of those people who have experienced negative job consequences for teaching modern evolutionary theory—people like Steve Bitterman, Alex Bolyanatz, Richard Colling, Nancey Murphy, Gwen Pearson, Chris Comer, Paul Mirecki, Eric Pianka, and so on.

2. Expelled claims that the intelligent design movement offers a legitimate scientific challenge to modern evolutionary theory. I can’t imagine that anyone, even a fervent design advocate, could think that Expelled actually makes the case for this claim. All we really get are some assertions by folk like William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, and a few others that there really is a “there” there, and the now-infamous rip-off of XVIVO’s cell animation. Expelled simply shows several minutes of this video, without comment. I suppose that Stein and company want readers to infer that the cell’s complexity rules out evolution. Yet the film never actuall goes to the step of making the “irreducible complexity” argument; there is no talk of bacterial flagella or blood clotting cascades. (Michael Behe is strangely absent from the film.) This matter has, of course, been debated over and over and over again—which fact makes it hard for ID advocates to support the victim stories from item 1 very well! At any rate, I shall leave it to the scientists and the ID advocates to debate whether ID models really have any status as science. Actually, I would recommend the book Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse in Dialogue (ed. Robert B. Stewart; Fortress, 2007) as a good starting place (if you need one) where you can hear from advocates on “both” sides of the debate.

Before moving on to the next point, though, I do need to say that my irony meter just about went off audibly in the darkened theater when Stein tried to make this point by interviewing, of all people, Jonathan Wells—the same Jonathan Wells who famously wrote:

At the end of the Washington Monument rally in September, 1976, I was admitted to the second entering class at Unification Theological Seminary. During the next two years, I took a long prayer walk every evening. I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life, and the answer came not only through my prayers, but also through Father’s many talks to us, and through my studies. Father encouraged us to set our sights high and accomplish great things.

He also spoke out against the evils in the world; among them, he frequently criticized Darwin’s theory that living things originated without God’s purposeful, creative activity. My studies included modern theologians who took Darwinism for granted and thus saw no room for God’s involvement in nature or history; in the process, they re- interpreted the fall, the incarnation, and even God as products of human imagination.

Father’s words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.

“Father” in this passage is, of course, Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church. In the testimony quoted above, Wells clearly states that his motive for getting a Ph.D. in biology at Berkeley was to “destroy Darwinism,” because of an antagonism to “Darwinism” stemming from “Father’s words, my [theological] studies, and my prayers.” Yet Expelled has the gall to put Jonathan Wells on-screen while trying to say that the ID movement is motivated by science rather than religion. Unbelievable.

3. Expelled claims that “Darwinism” leads (almost) inevitably to atheism. As many will already know from promotional clips, Expelled tries to achieve this through interviews with Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers, along with very short clips featuring Daniel Dennett and Oxford chemist Peter Atkins. These fellows are well-known atheists, and Dawkins and Myers, at least, credit science and their study of evolution at least partially for their own atheism. This is where the exclusion of folk like Ken Miller and Francis Collins from the film really chafes. There are many, many scientists who affirm robust versions of both modern evolutionary theory and Christianity—but you’d never know it from watching Expelled. Since Expelled seems to want viewers to believe that “Darwinism” leads ineluctably to atheism, the omission of these “complications” really does make a material difference in the film’s argument. Expelled is calculated to make uninformed viewers think that all evolutionary biologists think about religion like Dawkins and Myers do.

I personally found two moments within this “story arc” particularly egregious. One involves the aforementioned Richard Dawkins. Before I go any further, I should like to make it clear that I disagree with Dawkins about a great many things, and once upon a time I set out to do a long serial review of The God Delusion here on Higgaion. I never finished, because I was working from the audiobook, which proved very difficult to review. I have since purchased a paper copy, but never got back to finishing that long review. Perhaps I shall do so in the future. I agree with David Berlinsky when he says, in Expelled, that Dawkins doesn’t make a good philosopher. Yet Stein pulls a really dirty trick on Dawkins in his Expelled interview. Stein presses Dawkins on whether Dawkins can completely rule out intelligent causation in the development of life on earth. Dawkins, being appropriately humble, replies that of course he can’t be absolutely certain. After a bit more pressing from Stein, Dawkins allows only that intelligent design could be involved if some more-highly-advanced intelligent species from somewhere else did some genetic engineering on early terrestrial life. In a voiceover, Stein then mocks Dawkins for believing that aliens, but not God, could have “designed” life on earth.

But Stein and company have spun the exchange to mislead viewers on two fronts. First, Dawkins doesn’t genuinely believe that space aliens manipulated life on earth. He knows, however, that he cannot absolutely rule out any intelligent tinkering with life in the past—he is too intellectually honest to claim 100% certainty on this point. Therefore, he says (in effect), “If any intelligent designing were done, it would have to have been done by an intelligent being that had itself evolved.” Dawkins says this, of course, because he is a materialist through and through (I mean “materialist” here in the philosophical sense, of course, not in the consumerist sense). Since he cannot entertain the idea of supernatural entities as anything other than a kind of thought experiment, of course he must say that “If any intelligent designing were done, it would have to have been done by an intelligent being that had itself evolved.” Given a materialistic worldview, there is no other possible conclusion. Now I don’t think we should treat such philosophical materialism as a given; it is far from proven, and as a theist, I believe that such philosophical materialism is actually false with respect to reality. Expelled actually starts to get interesting when it flirts with this issue of materialism, but it doesn’t really go anywhere except into another fit of misrepresentation (more on that in a moment). Yet Stein plays dirty when he takes a statement that Dawkins offers as a counterfactual conditional and treats it as if “Dawkins believes this alien nonsense” (“I thought this was science, not science fiction,” Stein intones).

Second, the exchange is misleading by omission in that Stein does not ask Dembski or Meyer about aliens. But in their attempts to argue that intelligent design thinking stems from scientific questions rather than religious beliefs, design proponents have run circles around themselves denying that the “intelligent designer” must be God. It could be space aliens, they say.

Thus while I argue for design, the question of the identity of the designer is left open. Possible candidates for the role of designer include: the God of Christianity; an angel—fallen or not; Plato’s demi-urge; some mystical new age force; space aliens from Alpha Centauri; time travelers; or some utterly unknown intelligent being. Of course, some of these possibilities may seem more plausible than others based on information from fields other than science. (Michael Behe, “The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis,” Philosophia Christi 3 [2001] 165; HT: IDEA Center)

“It certainly could be God, a supernatural creature, but in principle it could be space aliens of high intelligence who did the designing,” he [Philip Johnson] says. (San Francisco Chronicle, April 21, 2002)

Intelligent Design does not require an omnipotent or omniscient creator. This may be the single thorniest problem that Intelligent Design theory poses. The problem is often obscured by the fact that many opponents of Intelligent Design argue that ID is just a way of “sneaking in the Judaeo-Christian God.” They are mistaken. Remember that Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick has proposed that space aliens designed the universe. While his supposition is easy to ridicule, his reasoning is worth considering. As it exists, the universe shows intelligent but not perfect design. The easiest explanation is that the universe is the product of a lesser god, a demiurge such as Plato proposed in the Timaeus. An Intelligent Designer, yes, but not a perfect one. Space aliens are an obvious modern candidate for the role because they are gods only in terms of superior technology. They need not be thought of as morally superior, and certainly not as commanding obedience to a higher moral code. (Denyse O’Leary, “Intelligent Design: Beyond Creationism vs. Evolution,” March 2002) [Note that O'Learly misrepresents Crick; he suggested that aliens might have seeded the earth with biological life, not that space aliens designed the universe. The first claim has not caught on among scientists, and the latter is self-referentially incoherent.]

Dembski himself says something very similar in The Design Inference. Yet Stein does not mock Behe, Johnson, O’Leary, or Dembski for their “it might be aliens.” Why not?

The second really offensive thing about the “ID vs. atheism” part of Expelled was the misleading use of interview clips featuring Alistair McGrath and John Polkinghorne. In these clips, both McGrath and Polkinghorne criticize—as they often do—a purely naturalistic or materialistic worldview like that espoused by Richard Dawkins. Both McGrath and Polkinghorne have specifically criticized Dawkins on this very point. However, viewers unfamiliar with McGrath and Polkinghorne might easily come away from the film assuming that because they criticize philosophical materialism, they implicitly agree with the intelligent design crowd. But they don’t. Polkinghorne, for example, has written that

[a]fter all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.

and that

[e]volution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.

and, elsewhere, that

ID also makes a scientific claim of identifying molecular biological systems of irreducable complexity, but I do not believe it has made its case. It is not enough to consider a single system in isolation, since evolution works in an improvisatory way, coopting what has been useful for one purpose to help acheive another. ID also seems tacitly to make the theological mistake that God, who is the creator and sustainer of nature, would not be conetent to work through natural processes, which are as much expressions of the divine will as anything else.

Polkinghorne is a congenial man, and he is no materialist, but his is also no intelligent design advocate!

What about McGrath? McGrath certainly does not believe that modern evolutionary theory is inherently inimical to Christian faith, or that it ineluctably leads to atheism:

Now the rhetoric of [Dawkins's] argument demands that Darwinism, Lamarckism, and belief in God are three mutually exclusive views, so that comittment to one necessarily entails rejection of the others. Yet it is well known that many Darwinians believe that there is a convergence between Darwinism and theism. The extent of that overlap is most certainly open to discussion, and it is far from being a settled issue. Yet Dawkins’s conclusion depends upon proposing an absolute dichotomy—either Darwinism or God—when the theories themselves do not require such absolutist ways of thinking (though they certainly permit it). (McGrath, “Dawkins, God, and the Scientific Enterprise: Reflections on the Appeal to Darwinism in Fundamentalist Atheism,” in Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse in Dialogue [Fortress, 2007], p. 104)

Yet by selective editing, the producers of Expelled make McGrath look like he actually believes there really is an absolute dichotomy between “Darwinism or God”!

By the way, I have not been able to discover an unambiguous statement from McGrath, in print, regarding his attitude toward the intelligent design movement as such. However, the quotation above is quite clear and repudiates the point that Expelled tries to make McGrath support!

4. Expelled claims that “Darwinism” devalues human life and, as a result, was a necessary condition for the emergence of Nazi atrocities (and, by implication, Stalinist Communism as well, although the film makes this claim only by association, through the use of cutaway shots). This claim has been debated to death, and my attitude to this claim is pretty well summed up by the illustration that some science bloggers have taken to using:

To be sure, the Nazis did employ certain forms of eugenics—but they also employed Christian anti-Semitism and, for that matter, ballistics. But eugenics was a perverse attempt to transform “natural selection” into “artificial selection”; more properly, it applied the principles of selective breeding—which long preceded Darwin—to human populations. Stein’s attempt to link Darwin himself to eugenics depends on a very selective quotation. Stein reads the following passage from The Descent of Man:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick, thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

However, Stein does not read the very next sentence:

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

Had Darwin lived to see Nazi eugenics, he would have been as appalled as Stein.

The one word that expresses how I most felt when coming out of Expelled is: deceived. Expelled tells stories that are simply at odds with reality. The film overblows its “martyr” stories, presents no actual evidence for intelligent design (it just assures us that such evidence exists), plays up a false dichotomy between “Darwinism” and religious belief, and tries to smear “Darwinism” with a false causal link to Nazi atrocities. Stein comes off not as a fearless crusader for the truth, but as a con man. Don’t buy a used car—or a worldview—from this guy.

And rightly so. It should make the rest of us happy, too. The Encyclopaedia Brittanica has started a program called Britannica WebShare that allows “web publishers” free access to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica online addition—and this includes the ability to link users through to those articles. Britannica defines “web publisher” somewhat fuzzily, fuzzily enough to include bloggers. Prospective WebShare publishers must go through a brief application and vetting process. I have just submitted my own application, and I would encourage all biblicabloggers to do the same. I already enjoy free (to me) access to Encyclopaedia Britannica online through my institutional library, but if approved for WebShare I will also be able to link through from Higgaion (and Dystemporalia) to relevant EB articles.

Have you ever seen a mediocre or outright bad movie that had good music? For example, while I enjoyed the creature effects in Eragon and 10,000 BC, I found the plots of those movies insufferable. Yet I regularly listen to the rich soundtracks from both films. What movies would you put into this category of poor films with good or even great scores? (Note: I’m really looking for orchestral scores, not “soundtracks” made up of rock or pop songs.)

At least three more reviews of Expelled have been posted online by mainstream newspapers. Stephen Whitty of Newshouse News Service—the review is published in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune—gives Expelled 1/2 out of four starts, but the three-paragraph review actually tells readers very little about the film. The Chicago Tribune reprints Roger Moore’s 1-star review from the Orlando Sentinel. Given Moore’s history with the film already, there are no surprises as he pans the show, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong in his assessment. Finally (for now), MaryAnn Johanson of the Colorado Springs Independent also pans the film. Here’s the real heart of Johanson’s review:

It’s nuttiness right from the opening moments of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Images of Nazi atrocities and the terrors of life behind the Berlin Wall are smugly deployed in an attempt to editorialize away basic scientific fact. In a saner universe, you could scoff at Stein and not give his nonsense another thought. But we don’t live in that universe. We live here, where the religious insecurity of a scientifically illiterate populace is being twisted by people who certainly know better.

We cannot dismiss this movie, because all those who care about public discourse in America and the ongoing war on scientific literacy need to see it in order to arm themselves against the idiocy. The film — written by Stein, Kevin Miller and Walt Ruloff, and directed by Nathan Frankowski — shows just how insidious the “intelligent design” proponents are.

Stein’s thesis is that Big Science, academia, the media and the courts have been bullying the poor, brave mavericks who “dare” to question the theory of evolution. These heroic few instead believe that only an “intelligent designer” could have guided it.

Since Stein is unable to adequately critique evolutionary science, he resorts to a kind of name-calling that is purposely designed to mislead his audience. He constantly refers to those who accept evolution as “Darwinists,” which is akin to referring to quantum physicists as “Newtonians” or “Copernicans.” He does this even though one of his own ID proponents notes that biological science has moved on from Darwin just as physical science has moved on from Newton.

Call it nutty, call it silly, call it what you will—but ill-conceived misconceptions can’t just be left unanswered.

Update: See now also Sean Means’s review in the Salt Lake Tribune (a generous 1½ stars out of 4).