Expelled

[Jenksismyhero]

http://www.expelledthemovie.com/home.php

 

Anyone see the trailers for this? As someone who's sorta is down the middle with this topic, I think I'll check it out.

[CrimsonWeltall]

All reviews so far point to this movie being an F- in content and delivery.

[mr_genius]

I wonder if it'll make any money

[Balta1701]

I wonder if it'll make any money

You don't make these kind of films to make money.

[knightni]

Like Idiocracy, it'll just fade away.

 

 

[FlaSoxxJim]

Like Idiocracy, it'll just fade away.

 

Unlike Idocracy, this is an agenda-driven propagandist piece that has resorted to enlisting the same PR company that brought the Jeezo crowd out by the busload to put Passion of the Christ on the map. And that is exactly the crowd that I care about having an understanding of the origins of life on earth.

 

And no, there's not enough green on the Internet to convey the level of sarcasm intended in that last line.

[GoSox05]

He also claims in this movie that evolution leads to Nazism.

[FlaSoxxJim]

He also claims in this movie that evolution leads to Nazism.

 

Yes he does, which gives the film less than zero academic credability.

[Jenksismyhero]

Well I doubt I'll be going to theaters to watch it, but if he gets a good discussion in the country going I say good for him. I have no issue with evolutionary theory, nor do I have an issue with there being a creator. I don't see how both ideas can't mix.

 

As I tell my athiests friends all the time, you believe that gases just existed there in space and eventually formed together and blew up and millions of years later we came into existence. I believe (at least right now) that a higher being put those gases there. Both of us have a huge leap of faith in believing in something that can never be proven. I don't see why one side is so much more obviously right than the other, which is what our educational instutitutions seem to suggest. That's what I got from the trailer of this movie, and if that's the case then i'd be interested in who he talks to and what they have to say.

[NorthSideSox72]

Well I doubt I'll be going to theaters to watch it, but if he gets a good discussion in the country going I say good for him. I have no issue with evolutionary theory, nor do I have an issue with there being a creator. I don't see how both ideas can't mix.

 

As I tell my athiests friends all the time, you believe that gases just existed there in space and eventually formed together and blew up and millions of years later we came into existence. I believe (at least right now) that a higher being put those gases there. Both of us have a huge leap of faith in believing in something that can never be proven. I don't see why one side is so much more obviously right than the other, which is what our educational instutitutions seem to suggest. That's what I got from the trailer of this movie, and if that's the case then i'd be interested in who he talks to and what they have to say.

I definitely agree that both sides of this issue tend to have a very arrogant streak. Neither can prove or disprove the existance of a greater being.

 

But I think what is being dismissed by academia is the idea of biblical creationism - that the world is only 2500 years old, etc. And I tend to agree that that sort of thing has no place in a classroom, except maybe as a mention on other peoples' beliefs. Its just too outlandish.

 

[StrangeSox]

Well I doubt I'll be going to theaters to watch it, but if he gets a good discussion in the country going I say good for him. I have no issue with evolutionary theory, nor do I have an issue with there being a creator. I don't see how both ideas can't mix.

 

The problem comes in when people try to push purely philosophical ideas and beliefs into the science realm. Science cannot deal with supernatural events and things like omnipotent creators. We can detect gases and background radiation and hypothesize that there was a Big Bang. We can't collect data on God. As far as I know, science does not try to deal with where the matter came from for the Big Bang or what anything was like before the Big Bang, but I could be wrong.

 

Another problem that anti-evolutionists have is that they often confuse cosmology (formation of the universe) and abiogenesis (formation of life from non-life) with evolution. I'm not sure if this movie does that, but I really can't find much information on their website about the actual content of the film.

 

The Wikipedia page for the film lists a lot of controversy. There's also this site run by the National Center for Science Education.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_...ligence_Allowed

http://www.expelledexposed.com/

Edited April 15, 2008 by StrangeSox

[FlaSoxxJim]

Another problem that anti-evolutionists have is that they often confuse cosmology (formation of the universe) and abiogenesis (formation of life from non-life) with evolution. I'm not sure if this movie does that, but I really can't find much information on their website about the actual content of the film.

 

Yes, the film is certainly going to conflate these very different fields - you can tell that from the ads running for it on Comedy Central.

 

As far as hearing what the main focal figures of the film have to say, keep in mind that three of the four key figures have existing ties to Intelligent Design advocacy groups like Discovery Institute and the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. So, basically, we should expect the same kind of fringe scientists trotted out to bolster up ID as we saw when Big Tobacco paid some fringe scientists to trot them out and tell us all to smoke up and not worry about cancer and lung disease.

 

[Soxy]

I'm hijacking this thread.

 

Flaxx--have you read any evolutionary Psychology (or Sociobiology, though they're rather different--at least according to evopsychs). Any thoughts on those behavioral type theories of evolution?

[Jenksismyhero]

The problem comes in when people try to push purely philosophical ideas and beliefs into the science realm. Science cannot deal with supernatural events and things like omnipotent creators. We can detect gases and background radiation and hypothesize that there was a Big Bang. We can't collect data on God. As far as I know, science does not try to deal with where the matter came from for the Big Bang or what anything was like before the Big Bang, but I could be wrong.

 

Another problem that anti-evolutionists have is that they often confuse cosmology (formation of the universe) and abiogenesis (formation of life from non-life) with evolution. I'm not sure if this movie does that, but I really can't find much information on their website about the actual content of the film.

 

The Wikipedia page for the film lists a lot of controversy. There's also this site run by the National Center for Science Education.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_...ligence_Allowed

http://www.expelledexposed.com/

 

 

From what I can tell from the trailer and website, this is exactly his point. Scientists lecture about everything that happened after X point in time, but they have no explanation for what happened prior to that.

 

 

[Jenksismyhero]

Yes, the film is certainly going to conflate these very different fields - you can tell that from the ads running for it on Comedy Central.

 

As far as hearing what the main focal figures of the film have to say, keep in mind that three of the four key figures have existing ties to Intelligent Design advocacy groups like Discovery Institute and the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. So, basically, we should expect the same kind of fringe scientists trotted out to bolster up ID as we saw when Big Tobacco paid some fringe scientists to trot them out and tell us all to smoke up and not worry about cancer and lung disease.

 

 

And like Michael Moore uses in every one of his films right? Or Al Gore in his? I grant you that this is not going to be a scientific documentary, but it should have as much clout as other documentaries put on the big screen - i.e. viewers are smart enough to realize that they are merely introducing a topic for discussion and obviously have an agenda for doing so, so the discussion will be weighted accordingly. It's up to individuals to take that and go find their own facts and own opinions about it.

[NorthSideSox72]

From what I can tell from the trailer and website, this is exactly his point. Scientists lecture about everything that happened after X point in time, but they have no explanation for what happened prior to that.

Which is how it should be. How is that a problem? Its not their job to talk about what/how the speck that became the big bang because that speck. You start from where you can.

 

[FlaSoxxJim]

I'm hijacking this thread.

 

Flaxx--have you read any evolutionary Psychology (or Sociobiology, though they're rather different--at least according to evopsychs). Any thoughts on those behavioral type theories of evolution?

 

Sure. Popular authors like Dawkins and Pinker devote a good deal of time to evolutionary psychology. Other than the fact that hypotheses proposing present-day human behaviors as adaptive outcomes of human evolution are near-impossible to actually test, I think this is every bit as valid a field as any other branch of ethology. If the vertebrate eye and the mammalian immune system are seen as the functional products of natural selection, then certainly the human capacity for language, memory, perception, etc., should also be viewed this way.

 

I agree to a point that fields like this are sort of at the nexus of 'hard science' and 'soft science', but human adaptations didn't accumulate on accident and this seems an entirely reasonable way to look at human behavior within a meaningful evolutionary context.

[StrangeSox]

From what I can tell from the trailer and website, this is exactly his point. Scientists lecture about everything that happened after X point in time, but they have no explanation for what happened prior to that.

 

I don't know about this movie specifically, but that's not the debate that Intelligent Design advocates such as the Discovery Institute or Answers in Genesis advocate. They throw out evolution all together.

 

From what I've read on the wikipedia and NCES pages, this movie is more along those lines than trying to explain pre-Big Bang.

[FlaSoxxJim]

And like Michael Moore uses in every one of his films right? Or Al Gore in his? I grant you that this is not going to be a scientific documentary, but it should have as much clout as other documentaries put on the big screen - i.e. viewers are smart enough to realize that they are merely introducing a topic for discussion and obviously have an agenda for doing so, so the discussion will be weighted accordingly. It's up to individuals to take that and go find their own facts and own opinions about it.

 

I don't care to persuade anyone not to see the film. In fact, the website says they'll give school groups $5-10 a head to see it as a group, so I think it would be a hoot to take a faculty field trip to see it on the film company's dime.

 

I know that one of the principles in the film believes she was passed up for tenure because of her beliefs, but there is no evidence for that and a lot of tenure track faculty in her department are passed up for academic reasons. I'm sure the other folks will have their own axes to grind with 'Big Science' as well.

 

But here's the thing about Big Science; it's where the majority of investigators fall because the accumulated weight of evidence directs them there. Sure, there are always going to be minority dissenting viewpoints, and it’s wicked cool when those dissenters are vindicated as new evidence begins to lend credence to ideas that were previously considered out of the mainstream. But this doesn’t describe the creationists/ID proponents or whatever they are called at the moment. They are the biological equivalent of the flat-earthers, and no amount of unfounded theories in support of an untestable divine agent is going to change the fact that they are on the side of ‘Small Science’ for a reason.

[Balta1701]

Which is how it should be. How is that a problem? Its not their job to talk about what/how the speck that became the big bang because that speck. You start from where you can.

It's still in its infancy compared to where we are in understanding what happened after the big bang, but I wouldn't say that there haven't been theories postulated about what could have been the driving force for the big bang itself. And I'll admit I don't understand them at all, I can give you one example. M-theory, one postulated method of looking at the universe, proposes that the universe is actually well represented in some fashion by 11 demensional "Membranes" consisting of the 4 dimensions we're familiar with (x, y, z, and t) and 7 other dimensions that are wrapped tightly around themselves. Somehow, out of this theory, comes a postulate that you could create something akin to the big bang and the formation of a universe by the collision of 2 of these 11 dimensional membranes.

 

Don't you dare ask me how it works, because I haven't the faintest. But I would like to note that there is work being done and theories being written that may some day be testable about what actually gave rise to the big bang and the universe itself.

[hitlesswonder]

Say what you will about the movie, the central conflict here is that schools are funded by tax dollars in this country and only 12% of the population want an evolution-only curiculum. 55 % want all three of ID, creationism, and evolution taught while 23% want creationism only. Given who is paying for the schools, people of faith can make a strong case that creationism and ID should be taught alongside evolution and if secularists have a problem with that, they can always home school. Or we can do away with public funding of education. It's a hard argument to refute.

[FlaSoxxJim]

Say what you will about the movie, the central conflict here is that schools are funded by tax dollars in this country and only 12% of the population want an evolution-only curiculum. 55 % want all three of ID, creationism, and evolution taught while 23% want creationism only. Given who is paying for the schools, people of faith can make a strong case that creationism and ID should be taught alongside evolution and if secularists have a problem with that, they can always home school. Or we can do away with public funding of education. It's a hard argument to refute.

 

No it's not hard to refute. Church/state separation rightly keeps teachers from disguising their personal religious beliefs and passing it off as science. If the fundamentalists have a problem with that, they can always home school or go to the denominational school of their choice.

[CrimsonWeltall]

Say what you will about the movie, the central conflict here is that schools are funded by tax dollars in this country and only 12% of the population want an evolution-only curiculum. 55 % want all three of ID, creationism, and evolution taught while 23% want creationism only. Given who is paying for the schools, people of faith can make a strong case that creationism and ID should be taught alongside evolution and if secularists have a problem with that, they can always home school. Or we can do away with public funding of education. It's a hard argument to refute.

 

How many people in that poll do you think could even define the terms evolution, Intelligent Design, and Creationism, much less have an in-depth knowledge of the relevant scientific fields? I would prefer the people designing school course content to know something about the topics in question.

 

The "majority wants it" argument probably won't fly with the courts either, who have repeatedly ruled against ID/Creationism.

 

[Balta1701]

The people at the National Center for Science Education have slapped together a good looking webpage in response to the movie, giving detailed and understandable rebuttals to the claims made in the movie and going through some of the dishonesty that abounded in the process of creating the film. Expelled Exposed.

[santo=dorf]

Say what you will about the movie, the central conflict here is that schools are funded by tax dollars in this country and only 12% of the population want an evolution-only curiculum. 55 % want all three of ID, creationism, and evolution taught while 23% want creationism only. Given who is paying for the schools, people of faith can make a strong case that creationism and ID should be taught alongside evolution and if secularists have a problem with that, they can always home school. Or we can do away with public funding of education. It's a hard argument to refute.

Science isn't a democratic debate.

 

If taxpayers want social study teachers to teach the world is flat and have math teachers teach 1+2=4, they shouldn't tell the dislikers to go to home school.

 

A more serious example, how about a town filled with Neo-Nazis who don't want history teachers to teach about the Holocaust because they feel it didn't happen.

 

Doing away with public funding education is beyond ridiculous as well.