A while back, Ben Stein released a really bad movie about Intelligent Design called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. After long refusing to review it, we finally get Roger Ebert's thoughts on the movie.
Naturally, Ebert skillfully tears it apart. He does a particularly good job of addressing the "excluded middle" strategy routinely taken by proponents of Intelligent Design:
By his premise no secularists believe in Intelligent Design, and no people with religious beliefs subscribe to Darwin's theory. If there are people with religious beliefs who agree with Darwin (Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, for example) they are mistaken...This is one of the things the movie does quite well. They cast the debate as a struggle between all religious people and all non-religious people rather than an effort by a few religious people with one extreme belief to foist it upon everyone else.
For example, consider their interview with Eugenie Scott, Director of the National Center for Science Education,* about the organization's efforts to counter the introduction of ID into the public school classroom. They make sure to emphasize the fact that she is an atheist. When she points out that a lot of the organization's support comes from religious people (Catholics, Jews, etc.), they frame it as though these nice religious people are getting hoodwinked out of their money to support some godless cause. Never mind that the each of the last three Popes, all the way back to 1950, have directly stated that there is no conflict between Catholicism and evolution. As Pope John Paul II put it, Truth Cannot Contradict Truth.
This is why I don't get why so many religious people are scared of science: if God really did create the world, why don't religious people view the effort to objectively study and understand the natural world to be the most holy calling to which one may aspire? One intelligent commenter on Ebert's review put it more eloquently than I can:
As a devout Mormon with a PhD in genetics, I am always amazed at the anger that evolution evokes in some people or why they think that learning evolution is so dangerous to faith. Personally I think that religion that cannot handle truth gained from looking at the world around us is denying the most important works of God. The Bible is a short and incomplete book that does not attempt to explain orchids or dinosaurs or many other things.Well said!
*I still owe the NCSE about $100 to offset the price of admission for two to Expelled, the Creation Museum, and the Creation Museum planetarium. These field trips are getting expensive.
