Expelled, the Movie.
From Tom Ascol:
Ben Stein chronicles the experiences of scientists who have been blackballed by the academy for questioning the ideologies of Darwinism, global warming and the like. Stories about such leftwing fundamentalism have been accumulating through the years, but no one has ever attempted to weave them all together and portray them on the big screen. Evidently, that is exactly what "Expelled" attempts to do. It ought to be fascinating to watch antics of those who, while screaming for academic freedom and ideological pluralism, militantly cut off dissident voices that dare question current scientific dogma.I might add that it might help to shed some serious light on "peer review." It's high time it be exposed for the farce that it is. It's mighty easy to say somebody hasn't produced a peer reviewed work when the establishment is using the process to keep dissent out. Personally, I find it highly ironic that those who talk about religion stifling free inquiry and calling on the days of the Inquisition are the ones today practicing the same tactics. I'm reminded of how this works even in biblical scholarship. One need only thumb through the index of a standard liberal commentary and compare it to a standard evangelical commentary to see who is interacting with the other side.
One can already see the Darwinian Fundamentalists in action in Mr. Stein's first post.
Stein's post has the longest comment thread I've ever seen. 543 comments as of right now. Most of them from outraged evolutionists. Looks like someone's gone and gotten all freaked out.
ReplyDeleteThat's because Stein isn't already seen as a kook (read: Michael Moore/Algore). We're talking about the guy with the best movie lines ever! "Bueller? ... Bueller? ..." and "Anyone? Anyone?"
ReplyDeleteHe's BETRAYED them!
Darwinists will never be able to watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off again!
Hey Pete,
ReplyDeleteThe six questions that Robb fellow raised in the very first comment would make for some good blogging material.
Just a thought.
Fred
Fred wrote:
ReplyDelete---
The six questions that Robb fellow raised in the very first comment would make for some good blogging material.
---
Possibly, although my first reaction on reading them was, "I wonder what would happen if we substituted 'Darwinism' for 'ID'. Would the Darwinist be able to answer those questions?"
The problem with answering the questions from the "ID" perspective is that there is no one "ID" perspective. In reality, pretty much anyone who disagrees with Darwinian thought is automatically put into the ID camp by the media, Darwinists, and pretty much everyone else. Thus, a YEC is going to answer the questions far differently than a secularist who finds Darwin unconvincing, and both of them would answer the question differently than I would.
Actually, I probably do need to do a post in the future about where exactly I stand on the issue, so I'll probably do that instead :-)
But to give you the gist of my view, it does have shades of the concept of Platonic "ideals." (Although I don't view it that way, it's easier to talk about them that way.) For instance, we can say there is the concept of the ideal tree, or "treeness," and each individual tree is patterned after that format. One of the reasons I lean this way is because Darwin himself noted (according to Stephen Jay Gould, anyway) that islands without trees developed plants that were tree-like. I wondered why it would be the case that a regular fern would change so that it was acting like a tree, unless there is some kind of underlying "pattern" such that the island knows it needs trees (I am speaking teleologically here, but since Darwinists do this all the time I feel I am merely continuing the tradition).
In any case, with fractals we also see certain other patterns that emerge everywhere. Trees are fractal-shaped; the veins in our bodies, as well as the branching of our lungs, are fractal shaped, etc.
Further, since it is impossible for DNA (even as long as it is, and especially as short as it becomes after you throw out what Darwinists consider to be "junk DNA") to contain enough instructions to code an entire person, we know that there must be some kind of mathematical formula at work too. This is also illustrated by the fact that if you divide a zygote in two, both halves will grow into identical fetuses (twins)--but each fetus will be half the size of a regular fetus that you didn't cut in half during cell divisions. This makes sense if you think of it like a geometrical progession. A cell divides from 1 to 2, from 2 to 4, from 4 to 8, etc. We can view the first ten in this sequence as:
1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512
Now imagine if you divide the branch in half after the first division. Both branches would look like this:
1: 1 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256
2: * 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256
(the * indicates this branch does not exist until after the division of the zygote into two zygotes)
Plot both of these on a graph next to the graph of the first one and you will get a curve that looks identical but stops at half the size. Now, if the cells were dividing based on how big the embryo was, they would continue to divide until they reached the end (in our example, until they hit 512). If instead there was a counter that was clicking off the number of divisions that had already occured, it would stop after the same number of divisions, even if we divided the cells in half at one point. The fact that we can divide a zygote and it shows behavior for this latter hypothesis tells me that the cells somehow keep track of the number of times they have divided rather than keeping track of how big the zygote is.
In any case, mathematical formulas and equations, as well as the fact the life seems to follow after specific patterns (according to Mayr, eyes evolved independently at LEAST 40 times), this tells me that there is an underlying intelligence guiding how everything is happening. If things aren't where they need to be, "corrections" are made--ferns are made to function as trees, for instance. Or you get placental and marsupial animals that are IDENTICAL in morphology. Darwinists say this is covergent evolution, but even they will admit it is much more likely that two similar-looking organisms had a common ancestor that was similar-looking than that both arose from separate ancestors and just happened to look similar--indeed, that is the basis for all Darwinism! Yet the sheer number of placental/marsupial animals in Europe and Australia that are so similar cast doubt on the ability of convergent evolution (which can only be caused by environmental similarities allowing identical random mutations to craft the animals in environments as diverse as Australia and Europe) to explain this. A theory does not suffer here if it states that there is an underlying pattern (one is tempted to say "kind" here...) that the world "knows" it needs to follow, and therefore there will be "wolf types" and "mouse types" in both Europe and Australia.
Anyway, I'll write more in a future post about it to better explain it, but that gives you the bare-bones basics for what I currently think on the matter.
Friend of mine and fellow church-member is comment #2. We're on the ball in the Midwest!
ReplyDeleteWhat atheists will never understand: If God exists and he is a creative force, then there must be a hybrid linkage between the naturalistic and the transcendental. Atheists routinely commit the Wittengenstein's Net evidentiary fallacy by utterly refusing to recognize an entire set of explanatory permutations, just because they have a priori rejected the possibility of an intelligent designer or designer analog. Yes, atheitss, on of the POSSIBILITIES for the existence of an intelligent directive code in the DNA molecule is that, in fact, it was designed by an intelligent code maker designer.
ReplyDelete