science vs. religion

Last night, I saw Expelled. I entered the theater not knowing what the movie was about nor how controversial it has become in the science community. It featured Ben Stein (of Ferris Bueller fame) traveling around the US and Europe investigating why several prominent American scientists lost their prestigious university professorships for mentioning the term "intelligent design" (ID) in classes or writings. The film concludes that they were promptly ejected from academia by "big science," the powerful Darwinian evolutionists who [erroneously] consider ID to be the same as creationism.

My favorite athiest, smarmy Brit Richard Dawkins, had a prominent role in the film. Apparently, his cooperation and interviews only occurred because he was never told what it was all about. He wrote a blog called 'Lying for Jesus?' in which he bashes the film rather humorously: "The whole tone of the film is whiny, paranoid -- pathetic really. The narrator is somebody called Ben Stein. I had not heard of him, but apparently he is well known to Americans, for it is hard to see why else he would have been chosen to front the film. He certainly can't have been chosen for his knowledge of science, nor his powers of logical reasoning, nor his box office appeal (heavens, no), and his speaking voice is an irritating, nasal drawl, innocent of charm and of consonants."

Apparently, Dawkins and another of the scientists interviewed for the film, PZ Meyers, went to a screening in Minneapolis and PZ was, ironically, expelled from the movie theater. Somehow, the security didn't notice Richard Dawkins, who was able to enter the theater and watch the movie in its entirety.

Though it exacerbated my headache, I enjoyed the film. It wasn't the best thing ever, but it was thought-provoking and mildly entertaining. I had been of the opinion that intelligent design was a fancy new term for creationism, but I came away thinking perhaps there is a noteworthy distinction. Creationism is the idea that the Judeo-Christian God created the cosmos in six Earth days, and everything else from the Book of Genesis is literally true. Intelligent design is much more vague: a higher intelligence had a hand in creating everything in our world. The film debunked Darwinism, not to say that natural selection is invalid, but that it may be an incomplete theory. After all, Darwin published in the mid-1800s, and there have been a couple scientific advancements since then.

There were two parts I had trouble with: (1) Stein's visit to a former concentration camp in Germany in which he makes a large leap between Darwinism and Nazism, and (2) the use of a snippet of John Lennon's Imagine whose lyrics, "nothing to kill or die for/and no religion too," conveyed, in the context used, that 'no religion' automatically equals communism.

Still, I think it's worth a watch, because it gets people thinking and talking about science and religion. Are they at war? Are they mutually exclusive? Can they somehow be merged? Most importantly, how did life begin? Even though this is an answerless question and always will be, it's crucial because it forces us all to ponder life's meaning -- and to remember the importance of loving and accepting others, no matter their views and beliefs.