Recommendation: Expelled

Last night, my wife, some friends, and I went to see the movie by Ben Stein, "Expelled." It was a fascinating movie that opens your eyes and would be well worth your money to see. It is even better if you have a couple VIP passes to get in the theatre, as we did. You just have to love seeing a movie for free!

The movie was a documentary in the same class as "Supersize Me" in that it takes on a large issue central to our society and tries to show the corruption and, in my opinion, cluelessness of that establishment. In SM, Morgan Spurlock takes on the fast food establishments. In "Expelled," Ben Stein takes on science, and more specifically evolutionary biology.

This movie had an amazing draw to myself because of my past as a geneticist at one of the premiere universities in the midwest. I was emmersed in the phylogeny charts that showed how one species came from another and how they diverged exactly at 6.4 millions years ago (not 7.2 million I guess). I had also seen the hostile separation between scientific thinking and religious thought. One instructor I begrudgingly worked under had actually told me that if we lined up all of the religious people in a row, he would personally 'shoot every one of them.' Needless to say, I didn't work there long. Although I didn't quit for these reasons, it didn't help. I soon realized that science wasn't going to bring me the answers that I needed for the questions I had.

Apparently Ben Stein thought the same thing. "Expelled" asks all of the scientific questions that I as a Christian have about evolutionary biology (EB). How did life begin? Where did the first cell come from if that is how life started? And it's amazing how the leading thinkers of EB answer--I remember three. One said that he didn't know, but he was sure that God was not part of the equation. That's a given for most scientists. Another said that we started as little proteins on the back of crystals. His theory had something to do with how crystals are imperfect so the piggy-backing protein would have an opportunity for mutation (and he said this as matter-of-factly as if I said 'I have brown hair.') The third one was from Richard Dawkins, author of the God delusion. He did give the idea of intelligent design a greater than 0% chance of occuring in the world. But he said--and I paraphrase--that if it did, it would likely take the form of a higher intelligence who gave our planet a seed to start the EB cycle. It was amazing to see him say this. One of the most intelligent scientists in the world and he's convinced that it is more likely for aliens to throw a seed out the window as they pass by in space than to say that there is a chance of something creating this for a purpose. Of course, this view isn't exclusive. Dr. Francis Crick, the discoverer of the DNA double helix, believes this occured and may be the founder of this movement.

In the movie, Stein also deals with the social implication of EB. He visits a Nazi concentration camp where those deemed "without purpose" were exterminated for the greater good. He speaks to those who agree that EB 1.) gets rid of God, 2.) gets rid of life after death, 3.) destroys free will, and 4.) destroys ethics. Now take all of this into account and you have what is happily going on in America today. Abortion, genocide (not here yet but closing in on us fast), removal of God from all institutions, relativism, freedom to perform any act of immorality that appeals to you, viewing criminals as victims rather than those who the crime was committed on, and the destruction of objective thought. Of course, those who would agree with me cooly refer to these things as natural selection and the advancement of the human race.

Anyways, I could write for hours about this. It was a great movie and my hat is off to Ben Stein.