Before watching the movie, I expected to be so angry by the end of it that some people were afraid that I would end up going on a rampage, killing every creationist in sight. I expected to intersperse my bouts of hot rage at the ID creationists with some laughs at the utter ignorance of Ben Stein et al. I expected to be saddened by how fundamentalist religious beliefs had warped creationist minds, and I expected to be disgusted at the credulous creationists who would flock to the movie just to feed their sad delusions. With all those expectations, it was a good idea for me to watch the movie with an atheist friend. However, I simply did not expect the movie to be so boring. Not even Stein’s nasal drone could have prepared me for the utter failure of the movie to make me either get really angry or to start laughing hysterically.

The movie starts with Stein in his sneakers rambling about freedom and portraying himself as a great crusader for the cause of freedom in the face of persecution. He apparently failed to get the memo that lecturing a crowd of extras about how the establishment is suppressing ID is not the way science works at all. He also failed to get the memo that ID is not about religion, droning on and on about how ‘Darwinists‘ are persecuting ID and putting “science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch god”. Oops, Stein – you scored an own goal there for us ‘evil Darwinists’. You have proven that your side is all about religion, and you have nicely exposed the lies that your side has been peddling all along. Thank you for that little favor there, Stein.

To maximize the sensationalist nature of the ‘documentary’, scenes of Nazi death camps, gas chambers and tortured/dead Jews were badly inserted in the middle of ramblings about Darwinist persecution. Ben, how dare you disrespect millions of Jews that were murdered in the Holocaust by using their suffering to promote your theocratic, fundamentalist, quasi-political, lying agenda? How dare you compare the killing of millions of people with some IDists being criticized by the scientific community for not providing evidence for their assertions? How dare you claim that ID being flunked is tantamount to a new Holocaust? How dare you even think of using the Holocaust as a tool to prop up your lying agenda? How could you, Stein? Don’t you have any measure of shame?

Next, he interviews people who were supposedly expelled or persecuted for supporting ID. He touts the case of Michael Egnor as an example of this great ‘Darwinist’ persecution that rivals what Hitler did to the Jews. Now, get ready for this – all that happened to Egnor was that some people criticized him on the internet. Yes, let me repeat myself if this does not shock you enough: Egnor was criticized on the internet. This is one of the examples of ‘Darwinist’ persecution of ID that threatens the very idea of freedom and is comparable to the Holocaust. Egnor was the very same medical doctor (!) who remarked that one of the reasons evolution is false is because ‘brain tumors don’t evolve to make better brains’. Come on now, Egnor, how could you make such ignorant statements and then get all whiny about being ‘persecuted’ when you are called out on your fallacy? If you can’t take the heat, get out of the scientific ring.

Stein also lies about how Richard Sternberg’s life was nearly destroyed after he was fired from the Smithsonian for supporting ID. However, the truth is a lot less sensational than what the IDists claim. Sternberg was never employed by the Smithsonian. He was an unpaid research associate and he still has full access to research facilities at the museum. As I don’t want to continue beating a dead horse, the real stories about the so-called ‘academics’ who were expelled for supporting ID can be found here.

Stein continues his nonsense with interviews from the usual suspects – Dembski, Johnson, Berlinski, Marks, etc. They trotted out the usual nonsense “The cell is complex, so there is a designer! Design is a scientific theory!! It can be proven!! We just want to be heard!! This is a war of worldviews!! We are being persecuted! Waaaaaaah!!” All this is incredibly boring as we have been hearing them say the same thing for years without a shred of evidence to back up their claims. Those IDists were given the chance of their lifetimes in a courtroom in Dover, their leading light William Dembski was too cowardly to testify, Michael Behe claimed that ID is as scientific as astrology, they bombed in court and their case was shown to be one of “breathtaking inanity”. They had their chance and they failed.

Can we move on now, IDists? Some of us like our brains nice and functioning, thank you very much.

The best part was when the IDists he interviewed stressed that ID was not about religion, while Stein simply ranted in the next scene about how god was being kicked out of science by ‘Darwinist’ persecutors. Those IDists can’t even get their stories straight, and yet we are supposed to believe that they are doing doing real science? In my opinion, I really don’t think that insulting the intelligence of one’s audience is a good idea.

Wait, this is the ID crowd we are talking about here. My bad.

Stein goes on to demonstrate his ignorance by delightfully blabbering about how ‘Darwinists’ still cling to ‘Darwinism’ despite the fact that nobody knows how life actually arose. Stein invokes the tired old god-of-the-gaps argument to claim that since we don’t know everything about a particular scientific issue, GODDIDIT! Apparently, the ’science’ that the IDiots so badly want recognition for is their inane tendency to yell GODDIDIT instead of doing some actual scientific research.

The part where I wanted to slam my head against the wall was when Stein made fun of panspermia and asked “Is this really more plausible than god?”, killing any pretensions of ID being non-religious and again demonstrating his utter ignorance of the issue he claims to be so passionate about. Unless those ‘aliens’ or whatever that was seeding life on earth evolved through evolutionary processes, panspermia is actually ID. The fact that nobody seemed to realize that the idea of an intelligence seeding life on earth belongs on the ID side is apparently because everyone in their camp only sees ID in terms of special creation by the Christian god.

I was curious about the ID creationists’ excitement over Richard Dawkins supposedly admitting that ID is possible. What actually happened in the movie was nothing at all like what the people over at Uncommonly Dense want you to believe. Stein asked Dawkins to imagine a scenario in which ID could be possible, and Dawkins replied by saying that an intelligence could have started life on earth. Now, for those who think that this is some sort of staggering admission, Dawkins mentioned this possibility because Stein asked him to! He was merely answering Stein’s question, not advocating ID. Furthermore, Dawkins goes on to say that the intelligence itself must have evolved elsewhere through evolutionary processes. However, Stein deliberately ignores this, choosing instead to spew his lie about how Dawkins accepts ID as long as the Designer is not god.

The part of Expelled which truly made me angry was when Stein walked around concentration camps trying to look upset while blaming and trying not to blame ‘Darwinism’ for the Holocaust at the same time. He utters inanities about how he is not claiming that ‘Darwinism’ lead to Nazism, but Darwinism was the root cause of Nazi ideas. Stein ignores the widely-known historical fact that anti-Semitic ideas were around long before Darwin and that there were ideas about the extermination of Jews even before Hitler. (Check out Martin Luther’s rantings against the Jews, for one). Stein then claimed that ‘Darwinism’ led to eugenics without realizing that artificial selection has been around since the dawn of agriculture. Stein then threw in more right-wing propaganda with stupid remarks about how Planned Parenthood, abortion and stem-cell research are modern-day eugenic practices. Pandering to the fundamentalist base probably never looked so good. Stein also completely misses the point that even if evolution led to Nazism or that Hitler admired Darwin, the scientific validity of the theory of evolution has nothing to do with the consequences of accepting the theory. Clearly, the IDists making this inane claim are unaware of how science is done.

The movie ends with scenes of people tearing down the Berlin Wall and Stein basically comparing himself to great defenders of freedom and claiming that Big Science has erected a wall to keep god out, just like the Berlin Wall tried to keep ideas out, and that the fight to bring god into science is like bringing down the Berlin Wall, and that Stein cannot do it on his own, so he needs sheep to follow and bray after him, yada, yada, yada…

Thick on the propaganda, vacuous on the science – just like the whole big tent of Intelligent Design. As expected, Expelled fails to tell us exactly why ID qualifies as science. All Stein talks about is how ID is being persecuted, but we never see any of the so-called evidence that the ‘Darwinists’ are suppressing. If Stein is so passionate about freedom of ideas and the defence of truth, why not put the evidence on the table?

Could it be simply because there is no scientific validity to ID and that the only thing keeping them afloat is their spin machine? Could it be that we ‘evil Darwinists’ were right all along?

Scary thought, isn’t it, Stein?