Expelled, thoughts concerning.

I saw Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed yesterday. Very good movie, and it comes with high recommendations.

A few thoughts I had while watching that I thought I might share:

1) At first I thought the part of the movie about the Darwinist nature of the Nazis was sort of out of place in a film about the scientific debate between Darwinism and Intelligent Design in America. Typically, I avoid making arguments that can be ignored by invoking Godwin's Law, regardless of how true they are. You don't want to give your opponent the opportunity to dismiss your arguments as inflammatory propaganda (and it seems like this was the case: most of the critics I read dismiss the film as propaganda because it shows the Darwinism->Nazism connection). But upon further reflection, I realized how important it is to make the point. One of the main arguments used by Richard Dawkins et al. is that religion is bad because its so often used as a reason to do bad things, whereas no one ever does anything bad in the name of atheism (a claim silly in itself: atheism was a core tenet of the communist belief of Stalin and Pol Pot, which drove them to commit many atrocities). Indeed, in the movie, a protester is shown holding a sign that says something akin to "Religion causes Terrorism. All Terrorists are Religious." If that were true, though, that religion is what makes people do bad things, the 20th century should have been one of the most peaceful. Instead what we find is that people still do bad things, even without a religious excuse, and find something else with which to justify their actions. In the case of the Nazis, it was Darwinian evolution: the idea that they were doing the race a favor by removing undesirable genes from the pool.

2) Thank God they made the connection between Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood and eugenics. I felt like standing up and cheering when they pointed that out. It's incredible how often people talk about Planned Parenthood as this wonderful organization designed to help a women "make important choices concerning her health and reproductive freedom", without giving a care or thought to its origins as an organization designed to breed undesirable races from existence (a goal that, apparently, they're still interested in).

3) It amazes me that Dr. Peter Atkins can, with a straight face, proclaim that a) God doesn't exist and b) Religion is evil. As William Provine pointed out in the movie, (and he said this in all truthfulness and sincerity, himself an atheist), once you've shown there is no God, you demonstrate that there is no absolute morality and no free will. So how on Earth Dr. Atkins can say, in the same breath, that there is no basis for absolute morality, then make an absolute moral claim, is just incredibly dishonest with himself.

If there is no God, there is no absolute morality. Saying something is bad just means "I don't like it and I'd prefer people didn't do it." The point of ethics is nothing more than to set up a rule system that will make me comfortable until I die. Something can't be evil in that situation. "Evil" implies it goes against an absolute, objective order. What Dr. Atkins should be saying is "I don't like religion and it lowers my chances to be comfortable when other people practice it" (which is in itself an incredibly naive thing to say; I doubt the sick and dying on the streets of Calcutta would have been more comfortable without Blessed Theresa or her religion, or that Franciszek Gajowniczek would have been more comfortable spending three weeks in a starvation cell in Block 13, without Saint Maximilian Kolbe and his religion). In order to proclaim religion as evil, he would need to redefine evil to mean something that goes against the common goals of man, then demonstrate how religion does such (or define the common goals of man as something contrary to religion).

But even then, without free will, how can something be evil? If there is no free will, and all our actions are just the product of the way we are constructed, that itself being a product of random chance, how can we do evil? Can a chemical process be evil? Is it evil that two hydrogen atoms fuses together to become helium? Is it evil that water evaporates into the sky, then comes down again as rain? Is it evil that synapses fire in our brains? Is it evil that those synapses, merely the product of random occurrence, cause a chemical change in our muscles, causing the muscle to contract? And what if that contraction causes an action which destroys the life of another person? At what point did this process go from amoral chemical process to evil action? And how could it, unless it is chosen by one with free will?

4) I have totally lost any ability to take Richard Dawkins seriously. When he's not going over the deep end proclaiming parents who instill their values in their children as "child abusers", he is normally quite rational, witty, and interesting. But towards the end of the movie, during his interview with Ben Stein, he completely loses any semblance of rationality. After a movie's worth of quotes from him about how anyone who subscribes to ID must be stupid, ignorant, or insane, and after writing a book entitled The God Delusion where he describes God as a fairy tale for grown-ups, dismissing anyone who believes in Him as lacking in mental capacity, he goes on to say, in the interview with Ben Stein, that it's an interesting idea that life on earth may have been created by aliens—themselves the byproduct of random chance—and that's why it appears so complex. So in his own strange little world, God as intelligent designer = ludicrous, but space aliens as intelligent designers = "intriguing idea". As Ben Stein said "Richard Dawkins may be willing to accept intelligent design, depending on who the designer is." It just goes to show how caught up he is in his own petty bias and thickheadedness. He will accept the most far fetched and unexplainable of theories except that which makes the most sense and is, most likely, the truth. And the sad part is he lacks the intellectual honesty to admit to himself how closed off he is to what he doesn't want to believe. I actually began laughing at this point in the movie. It reminds me of this XKCD stip (which I link here, noting the irony, because I'm pretty sure Randall Munroe is a hardcore atheist). He has raised confirmation bias to an art form, dismissing any evidence that he doesn't like, then proclaiming that there is no evidence of God. Of course, as a Christian, I have the evidence of a nun who was cured of Parkinson's; the sun dancing in the sky and completely drying the mud-soaked ground; a pile of crutches outside of a spring in southern France; a piece of bread that turned into a piece of a human heart which bore no surgical marks; liquid blood that remains liquid even after hundreds of years; several hundred bodies which, for some reason, aren't decomposing; four detailed, eye-witness accounts about some guy who came back from the dead; and (if intelligent design turns out to be right), the fact that God has signed His name on every cell of every living organism in the universe.