Dr Kenneth Miller's Take on a Certain Film

Fortunately, although the film is still out roaming around unfettered and probably infecting a few already susceptible minds (very few, as it was in the showing that I attended), I'm hoping to write less about this topic in the near future. At least, until the DVD release, at which point all bets are off.

As Dr Miller says in his article in today's Boston Globe, it was because he and other scientists like him - that is to say, scientists who also have a theistic bent in their thinking - that they were Expelled from participation in the "No Intelligence Allowed" festival. They would, in the words of the film's Associate Producer, Mark Mathis, have "confused the issue".

And so they would have. Because if you're trying to fabricate a story about how "big science" locks real truth-seekers out of the process, and makes "martyrs" out of them, then having to draw a subtle distinction between theistic scientists and overt theists wrapped in a thin cloak of "almost science" is just too complex for a core audience that doesn't, judging from the content of the film, appear to deal well with subtlety.

Miller's assessment at the end of the piece is one that I hadn't considered, but I don't see now why it wouldn't be true:

""Expelled" is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word "expelled" may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended."

It's a very interesting article, from the author of Finding Darwin's God and the forthcoming Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul. Go along and check it out, when you have a moment, it's well worth your time.