Chapter 5 - Ben Stein’s Blunder

Summary

This essay was penned in 2008 shortly after the release of a documentary film titled <italic>Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed</italic>. Directed by Nathan Frankowski and starring the popular conservative financial commentator Ben Stein, it claims that there is an academic conspiracy afoot among scientists and scholars to censor the speech of creationists and Intelligent Design advocates. As the film appeared in over a thousand movie theaters, grossing $7.7 million, and was widely discussed in popular culture and the media, evidently we aren’t very adept at censorship. More importantly, I felt I needed to set the record straight about what the film is really about and why the speech of those who hold a different view of the origins and evolution of life on earth is not being suppressed, inasmuch as I was featured in the film. The government never moved to censor the film, theater owners gladly screened it, and a nontrivial portion of the public viewed it. What Stein and his on-camera voices object to is that their theory (that’s too lofty a word – call it conjecture) of a top-down intelligent designer of life is rejected by scientists for lack of empirical evidence and internal coherency.