Is Ben Stein Smarter Than A Third Grader?
So I got a chance to watch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Ben Stein, at first, appears to have made a strong effort to get both sides of the story on Evolution and why other not-so-legit hypotheses are not given the same attention by the scientific community. He seems quite bothered by the lack of “freedom” (touting the usual message of terrorists.). The only problem is he made a documentary supposedly about science and religion and forgot to understand exactly what science is.
A Science Lesson For Ben Stein
The documentary is compromised from the gitgo because Ben Stein is not versed in science’s tool for understanding: the scientific method. Check any third grade science book for a detailed understanding of the scientific method. I’ll not get into it here. However, I will point out where Ben Stein goofed.
Where’s The Evidence?
First, he forget that you must have evidence for any hypothesis you make before it escalates to anything worthy of being taught/discussed in a science class. Evidence must be in favor of your hypothesis. Gut feelings against a theory are okay for motivating a person to find the evidence. However, until the evidence is presented in favor of those gut feelings, they are not in the realm of science.
A person could hypothesize that eating leprecon hair can cause cancer. It’s actually completely okay to come up with such a whacked out hypothesis. However, Mr. Leprecon doesn’t gain any clout until he can lay down the evidence. Obviously, this is a silly hypothesis as everyone knows leprecon hair cures cancer. (joke) However, the lack of evidence for leprecons , much less their hair causing cancer, and the untestable nature of such a notions are what make this hypotheses ridiculous . (Keep in mind, that no one has ever proven or will ever prove that there are no leprecons. You can’t prove something doesn’t exist!)
So, Ben Stein’s fundamental issue of “lack of freedom” in science is flawed. Scientists are quite free to think what they want and gather the evidence they want as long as they follow the scientific method. What Ben Stein is proposing, whether he realizes it or not, is we allow hypotheses with absolutely no evidence to be placed right beside and be taken just as seriously as theories which have literally billions of pieces of evidence to support them based solely on the grounds that such a theory doesn’t explain everything or doesn’t sit well with a person’s personal philosophies. He’s mixing philosophy with science and therefore would ruin both if he had his way.
Why No Public Debate?
The reason Intelligent Design people are rarely granted debates with scientists is because this will simply be a philosophical debate even though it will be taken by the public as something much more serious. Other than a certain specialized perspective, debating Intelligent Design vs Evolution philosophy with a biologist offers no benefit of debating the topic with a computer programmer or a professional lawn mower.
To accurately convey how this “debate” would work in science land, we simply need a giant dry erase board. We’ll list evidence for evolution. It would be staggering. A super computer would take weeks to copy and paste all the data. You’d have to measure it in “Library of Congresses”. (This is the part that the “just a theory” advocates screw up. A theory must have an outrageous amount of evidence supporting it!)
On the other side, we can list evidence for Intelligent Design that ADHERES TO THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. To my knowledge, there is zero unmistakable “home run” type evidence.
The Philosophical Side
I’d say that philosophers are often the most whacked out of free thinkers. Actually, I’m sure “whacked out free thinking” is the official definition for philosophy in the dictionary. They come up with all sorts of wild stuff. Some it is quite practical and useful. Some of it just seems crazy. In almost all cases you can’t really prove any of it. It’s just there as a “fun in thinking” type of exercise.
I’d bet there isn’t a person in the scientific community who doesn’t have a personal philosophy about God in our culture. These stem from life experiences, studying, etc. You are going to have a hard time finding anyone who enjoys thinking who doesn’t have a view on God.
So this idea of “considering the possibility of God” or intelligent design is something that I’m positive everyone involved has pondered, personally. How could you not? I think this is what Ben Stein is wanting. He wants scientists to admit that they’ve pondered it. There’s nothing wrong with pondering. People ponder giant green ogres played by Michael Myers all the time. Hell, I had a dream last night that I was attacked by a half tiger / half snake. I guess this is also pondering on a different level. Pondering is actually encouraged in science. Being crazy and thinking creatively is how we come up with crazy ideas like time not being fixed. (Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity). If we didn’t have it, all your Iphones would die.
Scientific Presentation
Another mistake Ben Stein makes is he can’t separate the difference between a scientist speaking publicly, officially, definitively, and “on the record” as an expert on a topic in which they’ve studied for decades and them just speaking of personal opinion on “grey areas”. Ben Stein wants a public declaration that Intelligent Design is a competitor in the scientific world. He’s not going to get it without evidence. (Ironically, Ben Stein doesn’t both to show even one single bit of evidence in favor of Intelligent Design, either.)
Problems With Evolution?
As stated in the documentary, all of us have a hard time really finding the evidence for how life began. There are some hypothesis out there, but none of them have enough weight to be convincing. So for now, we’ll keep that one on the back burner. Darwin certainly didn’t explain this one. He simply wanted to explain the “Origins of Species” and not necessarily the origins of life!
There are some questions that evolution certainly doesn’t answer. No Dr. Biology is going to claim that evolution explains everything. However, Darwin explained a hell of a lot. Some scientists may have philosophical gut feelings that evolution isn’t the right theory. Good! They should find the evidence.
Most people don’t know that Einstein hated his own work. He solved some major problems and has proven that his theories are superior to Newton’s time and time again. However, he couldn’t get it through his head that “god played dice”. (Quantum mechanics, an offshoot of Relativity, uses “probabilities” instead of fixed values and therefor lacks a bit of rock solid certainty where anything may be at any given time….even though the theory has held up for nearly a century.) It’s okay to have a philosophical gut feeling against the evidence. However, that doesn’t allow a person to disregard the evidence, either.
Evidence Conclusion
I’m glad that there scientists who strongly question The Theory of Evolution. That’s good! If they come up with evidence that contradicts Darwin, it’ll be revised, and a better, more accurate theory will ultimately result.
However, evidence is the name of the game here. Without evidence, you can’t get into the science building. Go home and don’t come back until you have some evidence.
The Rest Of The Documentary
So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’m not sure if it’s worth mentioning much of the rest of the documentary. When your entire premise is ruined because you didn’t understand 3 pages of your 8-year-old’s science book, it’s hard to take the rest of the documentary seriously.
- I found the idea of mentioning the Nazis, when speaking with the dude who taught had a bajillion Ivy League schools, to be fair. I thought the notion of visiting Dachau and other Nazi death camps to be entirely unnecessarily and sensationalist, at best. We definitely need to be aware of possible negative social repercussions of any scientific theory. However, spending a disproportionate amount of time on the Nazis provided no weight for his argument by anyone who understands the Nazis or Evolution. I think we call this a “cheap shot” designed for the ignorant.
- Of course, if you are going to mention the Nazis and their supposed Evolution-based effects, you’ve also got to mention the negative effects of religion. The Inquisition, The Spanish Inquisition, and The Crusades were all bloodbath’s for Jesus. People forget that Nazi Germany was, indeed, a Christian nation comprising mostly of Protestants and Catholics. I’d love to see the numbers of the religious views of those SS guards who did the dirty work in the death camps. I’m sure there would be strikingly view pro-science atheists.
If a person really wanted to make a list of all the religion-based atrocities, that wouldn’t be difficult. A good documentary would have taken both sides into account in an effort to find truth.
- I must say that I’m completely dumfounded by those in academia who were willing to officially and “on the record” support Intelligent Design. I’m blown away that such people would support a hypothesis with no hard evidence. They could have at least put the “Irreducible Complexity” guy on there as this is at least a step in the right direction.
- I noticed that Richard Dawkins didn’t seems nearly as sharp as he usually does. (Yes, he’s a jerk! He’s easily the “bad guy” and that’s why I love the guy so much.) In fact, on the documentary Dr. Dawkins appears to have fallen into a trap. (This shocked me!) What shocked me more was Ben Stein didn’t bother to hammer him on it. It would have been an incredible way to end the documentary. Then I found the unedited transcript. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XpP5jsg5kM It’s clear the usual dirty editing was used to twist words and make it appear that Dr. Dawkins really goofed when, in fact, he was simply noting the closest hypotheses to Intelligent Design in the realm of science: Panspermia. (Which Dawkins doesn’t adhere to anyway.)
- The notion of politics in science is a problem. It’s always been a problem. Most likely, it will always be a problem. All evidence must be interpreted by a person and some guys love a specific hypothesis while others flat out reject it (in their own minds). As more evidence is collected, truth usually comes out, regardless of whether people like it or not. When Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Quantum Mechanics came out, scientists spoke up and said, “There is no way this makes sense!”. However, no one was able to bust these ideas no matter how much they were hated. In fact, the more experiments that were conducted, the more obvious it became that there was something to these ideas, regardless if people found them intuitive or not.
Conclusion
For people like myself who read books by Einstein, Hawking, etc and look forward to the latest Scientific American each month, Ben Stein’s mistakes are juvenile, at best, downright unethical at worst. I don’t know if he’s trying to mislead those who don’t understand the scientific method or if he’s just thinking the way most non-science, pro-religion people think.
If he came out and said, “Evolution isn’t philosophically perfect” I think he’d have an average American documentary. (Don’t ask me why 100 years of losing an empire leads to infinitely better documentaries, but the UK is light years ahead of the USA in documentary land!) Of course, few of his target audience are going to be interested in philosophy. His title and premise are much more attractive to a broader audience. So maybe this was a good business move.
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