[asa] Videos

Well, it's happened. Several people at church have talked about showing a
video on science sometime, so I asked to take a look at it first. Turns out
there are two videos by Louie Giglio; one on the cosmos, and the other going
from space down into the cell, showing the grandeur of God (I presume it
will talk about Laminin). Haven't watched them yet, but I'll let you know.

In the meantime, last December I finally forced myself to watch (online on
Netflix), Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Having read plenty about it beforehand, watching Expelled confirmed my
suspicion: the subtitle is an appropriate Freudian slip. "No intelligence
allowed" is a pretty good description of the movie, not the scientific
community that it pretends to expose. My second thought was, if this is the
best that the Intelligent Design community can come up with, they'd better
just pack it up and go home. Its substantial collection of logical fallacies
and anti-scientific rhetoric is an insult to the intelligence of its
audience, not to mention mocking and accusing scientists and the scientific
community.

I've already talked to a friend who thought it was the greatest, and
mentioned the movie's false accusation against scientists by its reference
to Hitler, concentration camps, and other threatening and murderous images.
This constant ad hominem argument is not only wearisome, it is slanderous. I
also mentioned that though Hitler used Darwinian ideas in his writings to
justify killing the Jews, he also used Christianity in the same way. Does
Hitler's use of Christianity prove that Christianity is dangerous and
destructive? Or does it prove that Hitler was a madman who could use any
rhetorical argument to his advantage, no matter how illogical?

It mocks the scientists by taking their arguments out of context and
presenting them in a manner calculated to make them look stupid. One of the
best illustrations of this is the comment (I think from Daniel Dennett) that
life might have begun "on the backs of crystals", then the movie switches to
a fortune teller with a crystal ball. If someone doesn't know the difference
between a crystal structure and a crystal ball, he should not pretend he's
doing any favors to science or the truth. This doesn't mean that life did
begin spontaneously on crystals or anywhere else; it does mean that Stein
has used such goofy, anti-scientific rhetoric, that it defies belief.

On the other hand, though there are many practicing scientists who also
believe in God, I'm sure that there is a fair amount of bias in the
scientific community against "Intelligent Design" and religion in general.
I don't want to put the blame for this solely on Christians, but with this
kind of unintelligent tripe going around, it's sometimes seems difficult to
blame the scientific community for wanting to exclude anything that looks
like "religion".

Jon Tandy

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Received on Mon Jan 19 08:26:44 2009