April 21, 2008 by Craig
Twelve years ago, Homer Simpson said:
I got kicked out [of the audio-visual club] ’cause of my views of Vietnam. Also, I was stealing projectors.
Ben Stein and the intelligent design movement are also trying to “steal some projectors” with their new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Besides trying to promote the validity of intelligent design / creationism over evolution and tie Darwinism to the Holocaust, it also claims that the mainstream scientific community has persecuted those who do not believe in evolution — including firing various academics for publicly making anti-evolution statements.
Depending on your exact definition of “persecute”, part of that last statement may well be true. The major problem is that the cases that the movie cites as examples are basically exaggerated or otherwise misrepresented.
It’s important to see Expelled for what it is: a propaganda piece intended to win converts in order to gain power (and probably not a little bit of money). The evidence for this lies not only in analysis of the movie’s content but in analysis of the marketing campaign for the movie:
“Expelled” is spending millions to succeed, huge for a documentary. It’s hired four PR firms. It’s running a sweepstakes for church groups, offering a cash prize to the one that sells the most tickets. It’s paying up to 10 Grand for schools to send their students. The movie even staged a songwriting competition.
SONG: If you challenge evolution, you get expelled!
Oh, and Ben Stein traveled across the country on a bright red bus for “Expelled, the Road Show.” This is mostly the work of Motive Marketing’s Paul Lauer. He’s the guy who made “Passion” [ed: "of the Christ", the Mel Gibson movie about Jesus] into a phenomenon by harnessing the power of this country’s 160 million Christians.
PAUL LAUER: How do you get this big amoeba to flex its muscle? When it flexes, it’s enormous. The challenge has always been, How do you get those people to activate.
Expelled‘s message is that the scientific community is using indoctrination, obfuscation, and coercion to push it’s agenda. The irony (hypocrisy?) is that, in reality, those are the very tactics being employed by Expelled and the rest of the intelligent design movement. Skepticism and rebuttal are the ways to counteract this, and those are the goals of the scientific community — not its opponents.