Guest Post by Morbo
I monitor some websites that deal with creationism and “intelligent design” because, in my opinion, nothing the fundamentalists do makes them look more foolish than their refusal to accept evolution.
Recently, the ID sites have been all atwitter because they have a new champion: Actor and alleged comedian Ben Stein has just finished a “Michael Moore-style” documentary that will supposedly bring Darwinism to its knees.
In case you do not remember Stein, he played a didactic teacher who spoke in a monotone in the 1986 film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” That’s pretty much the highlight of his acting career. He reprised the role in a couple of television commercials and hosted a game show on Comedy Central. Recently, he has co-hosted a reality show on VH-1 called “America’s Most Smartest Model.”
Before that, Stein was a speechwriter in the Nixon White House. Under normal circumstances, a job like that would prepare someone well for a career in comedy, but in Stein’s case it didn’t work. His droning teacher in “Ferris Bueller” was funny for a few minutes but quickly wore thin. That small role is a rather weak donkey to have ridden all of these years, but somehow Stein has done it.
And now he has a new documentary out. In “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” Stein profiles alleged researchers who say their careers went down the tubes because they had the temerity to challenge Darwinian evolution. I’d say the real reason these people (whoever they are) lost their positions is because they were not engaged in actual science.
I stack the creationists into a pyramid. At the very pinnacle are the most ignorant specimens, the young-earth types who insist that the universe is 6,000-10,000 years old, maintain that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, insist that Noah’s Ark was real and believe the Grand Canyon is the result of a giant flood.
ID advocates pretend to be more sophisticated and thus are a few notches down on the pyramid. Many of them admit that the universe is ancient, for example. But at the end of the day, they are also practitioners of theology, not science. The bedrock of ID, after all, is an insistence that scientific evidence for God does exist and that humans are in fact that evidence, since we’re so well put together and all that.
I’ve been over this before: We aren’t well designed. If humans were intelligently designed, I want to see the warranty because somebody has some explaining to do. (Yep, I’m still pissed that squids got better eyes than us.) More importantly, trying to use the principles of science to prove the existence of God is a fool’s errand and runs counter to the central principle of religion: faith.
I don’t believe we have much to fear from Stein’s movie (which is due out in February). Ben Stein is no Michael Moore. For starters, Moore is witty. He knows how to use humor to make a point. Right-wingers think Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a “faggot” is a real knee-slapper. They also created “The Half Hour News Hour.”
‘Nuff said.