Thank You For Proving Me Right…
I’m getting e-mail and Dean has reported to me that people are commenting in other threads on my post about Expelled. But they’re not talking abut the film itself. They’re talking about how ID is wrong . Or, in the case of Scott Kirwin, how Ben Stein was wrong to connect Dawinism to Nazism.
So, I want to say thank-you to each of you for proving my point. You’ve not seen the documentary but feel compelled to tell us all how it’s wrong. Or, in Mr. Kirwin’s case, how Ben Stein is wrong about connecting Nazism to Darwinsim but not taking into consideration that perhaps I misunderstood Mr. Stein. Instead he chides Ben Stein anyway rather than doing the responsible thing, seeing the film for himself, and then writing his opinion. So, Scott Kirwin doesn’t correct something stated in the documentary he heard for himself, but goes off half-cocked based upon the very definition of hearsay. If this is the way Scott treats people he claims to like I’d hate to see how he treats people he doesn’t like.
I disabled comments on that post because of this very reason. Comments would have nothing to do with the documentary itself because everyone commenting never saw it. It wouldn’t be a conversation or healthy debate because the people attacking the film would be the very same people who never saw it.
So, if you saw Expelled and think I misrepresented it then I regret not giving you a chance to correct me. But if you didn’t see Expelled and still feel the need to correct me then I regret nothing. In fact your position spoken out of ignorace is the very reason I disabled comments.
And the very reason Expelled needs to be seen by everyone.
UPDATE: Based upon Dean’s suggestion I’m going to open comments on this thread. But if the conversation turns to “how ID is wrong” I’m shutting them down. If you’ve seen the documentary then please talk about it. If not, kindly refrain from opining because you can’t know what you’re talking about.
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22 comments
I think you should have had comments in the other post open and just let it go. No one requires you to read them (I mean, Ali doesn’t, right?).
Anyway, I’m waiting for the DVD. I refuse to see a documentary in theaters on general principles. :p
Elisha Feger’s last blog post..Sam!
That’s fair.
And maybe I should have allowed comments. But based upon the e-mail I’ve gotten and the comments Dean’s told me about there was wisdom in my move too.
I’m just tired of the Darwinian evolution vs. ID debate online. It goes nowhere. And I didn’t want to provide another place to have that pointless debate here because it really has nothing to do with the documentary. And I only wanted to talk about the documentary. That would mean hearing from people who’ve seen it only (or expressed interested in seeing it later) and leaving it at that.
But that wouldn’t, and didn’t, happen.
So, we’ll see what happens now.
I don’t read every thread either, and on occasion I’ll close comments although I’ve only done that a handful of times in the past 5 years.
I should also say that in at least one of the evolution-oriented threads, the discussion is fine since we were discussing there the apparent rapid speciation occurring in some lizards over a period of only a couple of decades.
Also, I will say that *most* comenters on this blog have been rational and respectful; the beating Kevin’s getting is coming from email and other blogs. It does ironically prove his point, people can’t seem to discuss the film and its central thesis, which is NOT about advocating Intelligent Design but rather documenting the abuses that go in in academic circles to anyone who dares to even be mildly sympathetic to I.D. arguments. Since I’m one of those people mildly sympathetic to I.D. that message hits home for me, even though I’m a staunch believer in evolution. Of course, I’ve read ID literature and I’ve found that most of them utterly agree with most of what Darwin said, and hold that much of it’s completely valid.
Oh well this argument won’t end, but people’s fury on the matter continues to amaze me. And I think Kevin’s right: are people arguing over the position he took on the movie itself? Are they people who’ve seen the movie? It appears to me that Stein’s more concerned about intellectual freedom in the schools than he is an I.D. proponent.
Kevin:
Two quibbles.
First, I don’t think you can legimitately demand that everybody see the movie before commenting. Even if a person hasn’t seen the movie, there is a surfeit of commentary on the Web from both sides. Therefore, it is entirely possible to form an opinion of the movie from secondary sources.
Second, criticism of Ben Stein’s linkage between evolutionary theory and Nazism is entirely legitimate in this instance, as it speaks to one of the central tenets of Stein’s polemic.
And in case anybody’s curious, no, I do not plan to watch Expelled unless I have an exceptional amount of time on my hands. Quite frankly, I have more pressing matters to attend to, including cleaning my house and car, racking up billable hours, attending classes, and visiting family and friends.
–|PW|–
Kevin
Don’t be a martyr.
You say you disabled comments because:
You’ve done this before and honestly, I find it annoying - which is why I devoted my opening paragraph to it. You are being quite disingenuous; you are consciously limiting debate on a topic you know is controversial.
You then go on to summarize the film. The film proposes ideas that are controversial, but that exist independently of the documentary they appear in. You yourself state “Expelled didn’t show me anything I didn’t already know.”
I didn’t see Michael Moore’s 911. Does that mean that I can’t argue against the “9-11 was an inside job” conspiracy theory?
You end with…
That wasn’t in the movie, was it? So how can you say that you limited your first comment to the movie when you yourself broadened the scope of the comment?
Face it, you were using the movie to hide behind to throw your little ID rocks. And you locked comments to prevent most everyone who comes the DW from throwing back - until I opened up my thread and started throwing stones myself.
But I leave my comments open because honestly, if you can’t take being flamed then you should write poetry not commentary. And I didn’t flame you - nor disrespect you in any way - other than state your commentary came across as a lecture. My beef is with the arguments - not you. In return I get the “Scott Kirwin” this and “Mr. Kirwin” that. It’s not very nice, but I’ll keep my tears to myself.
Also, that there are 2 viewpoints is not - in an of itself - an argument for including both arguments in a school curriculum. Oh, unless you are talking about a philosophy class. That seems to me to be a fairly large flaw in the whole “golly, why won’t they include ID in school” argument. It’s not science, that’s why.
PS - a third possibility is the dreaded Flying Spaghetti Monster. I mean IT IS another viewpoint, but that ALONE doesn’t make it suitable for a school curriculum, now does it.
Elisha, that’s a false choice for Kevin. If he doesn’t read them, then he gets accused of not backing up his position. And then messengerrr and the rest of the Kevin-hating legions will annoy us with endless comments about how he’s not answering their endless comments.
I generally think comment-closing is a bad idea; but in this case, there’s not a chance in hell that the comments will produce a single new insight that hasn’t been flogged to death in a million different venues already.
I disagree with Martin on comment-closing. I’ve closed comments for a couple reasons, one of them being when commenters head into ad hominems and it’s clear nobody involved is having fun.
And, oh yeah, administrivia is definitely no-comment land.
–|PW|–
Well, I loved the movie, and I have ZERO tolerance for the grand battle of between the secular Creationists and the divine Creationists.
The movie is very much an expert exercise in teleology and ontology
conducted with a well disciplined jurisprudence based in a remarkable expression of mitzvah.
He does an exceptional job of uncovering the problem with “sciencism” in the Sciences, and an even better job of exposing the pandemic incompetence and disengenuousness which predominate the administration of modern educational instutitions and their sycophant NGOs and associated non-profits.
It was especially interesting to hear him contemplate the significance
of religion (one’s metaphysical connection to a loving god) in
preserving mission and purpose in life for everyday folks who might
otherwise collapse into dispair and nihilism (Diaspora) to likely provoke more unrestrained (True Believer) useful idiot episodes of mass violence on behalf of this or that madman.
There’s plenty in the movie to take issue with, but these points
really stood out for me.. both from personal experience and things
topical to the movie:
1) Evolutionary Biology is DOA as a vital modern scientific discipline.
It’s been eclipsed and consumed by molecular biology. The EBs have been reduced to backwater protagonists trapped in a 19th Century model who have literally been left behind; glorified morphologists who are academically incapable of participating in molecular biology and biochemistry. The geneticists are almost as bad off. In biology, all the action’s in BioChem and MB. Even genetics is being swallowed and reduced into a subcategory of MB. The EBs are the odd man out. No wonder “top EB scientists” have the time to devote their remaining careers to “stopping religion with science.”
2) Midway into Stein’s chautauqua, I realized there there indeed is quite a BIG PROBLEM with “I.D.” while listening to the EBs as they “Inflated Darwin” and the paradigm described by him. Darwin was a morphologist who properly identified adaptation and variation were selected for, and reasonably postulated that all life’s forms evolved over time via selection pressure and mutation. He theorized if we could somehow follow the process backwards we could find “the origin of the species.” In practice — not so simple. But Darwin never attempted to inflate his theories to displace religion. His general theory remains correct today.
In Darwin’s defense, he had no working concept of a living cell, MB or genetics. He was a devoted royalist, and a phrenologist and
morphologist; a gentleman and devoted elitist of the European mold. His world view was entirely devoid of the learnings of molecular biology. He would have found it inconceivable that the ethnology of race and royal blood on which his era and world view were built has been entirely discredited and had no basis in modern science.
It was sobering to revisit the mass murder and institutionalized
violence based upon the inflation of Darwin and the conflation of
Darwinism with Phrenology, Eugenics, and Hegelian Elitism. The
Skinnerian Behavorialists (who still enjoy refuge in our university departments of education) are not far behind. Academia has not come to grips with the bad science and resulting abuses which have been
normalized in favor of “stopping religion.”
In sum, Creationists secular and divine war over the particularlites of “a nounified God” in all his juxtaposed reified glory. The notions of God and Notgod are both artifacts of concretized thought tied to everything but science. The secularism captured by Stein’s skillful inquiry was just as religious as the denomination of your choice.
Given our present technological limits, the matter of “Creation” is necessarily teleological and ontological. Whether the ultimate “Creation” was religious or secular is and should be irrevelant to matters of Science, which, properly employed, is reasonably unprepared to speak to the issue with absolute certainty.
What got to me was the insistance of the opposing Creationist camps that their beloved God (or Notgod) was entirely a noun; had to be a noun; that the cause of Creation had to be the absolute presence or the absolute absence of a thing called God.
To see this movie as being about rescuing “trojan horse bibliolatry” entirely misses a profoundly fascinating exercise in inquiry.
It is very much about man’s propensity to gather authority to systematically destroy those who do not fit his self-approved world view. The materiality of human world view, passion and mental or intellectual disorder often manifests in mass murder and cruelty toward innocents. Margaret Sanger and Hitler were indeed sycophants, as was most of European academia at the time.
Science matters to the human condition. And so does Teleology, Ontology and Theology. But Science alone is not evidence of Intellectual Health. One only need look at the history of Democide for proof of that tragic fact. Not all murderers are crazy, and some conduct there systematic killing with calculated scientific precision and peer-reviewed policy.
Stein has done us all a great service with this documentarian mitzvah. This remarkable man has done a remarkable thing.
I actually did see the flick and — it’s pretty good.
It’s not that Darwin was a bad fellow — for all I’ve learned he was an excellent scientist and not any more racist than the terrible standards of the day (can’t impose 21st century values on 19th century folks). The claim is that his followers (ie, Darwinists) have taken some kernels of undeniable, scientific truth Darwin discovered, distorted them beyond all recognition, and, worst of all, created this strange scientific cult of “Darwinism” which seeks to explain everything that’s happened on earth, including theology (there is no God).
The documentary makes this plausible case:
1. The majority of scientists think Darwinism explains life on earth.
2. A small minority thinks Darwinism has been extended beyond the limits of its scientific logic.
3. Group 1 tends to get group 2 fired at major universities and/or research centers.
4. This is bad, because unfettered Darwinism, in the past, has lead to terrible misdeeds by social Darwinists, first the Eugenics movement in the US in the early 20th Century, culmimating with Nazi movement of racial hygiene in the 40’s.
No, of course not, Darwinists are not Nazis. But it is true, I think, that Nazis used and misused a lot of Darwinian theory for their terrible social policies.
My own view is that any group seeking to fire another group is the one acting like Nazis.
Whether or not ID is true or not, or scientific or not, I suspect it’s probably worthy of teaching in the philosophy of science courses.
HankB
Kevin,
You do yourself a disservice to frontpage and then close comments. It demonstrates a disrespect for the open format of blogging and disdain for commenters ( your readers) and a wish to filter comments which challenge your comfort point.
Then you add to your discredit by announcing, “I have emails from people complaining” (ergo, I’m justified.)
I cannot make the same charge against myself because I’m not a blogger, nor a frontpager.
I merely comment and in four years, I have rarely reverted to the privacy of email to make my point because I think it is chicken manure.
If I have something to say, I do it in the combox. That way, I don’t have to have one opinion in my comment and another via email.
So why don’t you comment except on the frontpage ?
Or should one ask, why do you frontpage and not dialogue in the comment box ?
Why the hesitation ?
I frequently comment in comment threads. In fact, most of the writing I’ve done on this blog is in the comments threads. I’m an infrequent front page writer at best.
And, frankly, no one has a right to comment. Not even me. This is Dean’s blog and he allows each of us here to post on the front page or comment. As part of being a front page writer it is my right to close comments to my threads.
In fact, many bloggers don’t read or respond to comments to their posts. They fire out what they think and that’s that.
This particular issue is one I didn’t feel like commenting on, nor allowing comments to be made about, because, as Mr. Shoemaker notes above, this topic has been beaten to death. I didn’t want to be responsible for kicking the dead horse one more time. Or, more accurately, letting others kick the dead horse when, in reality, that particular dead horse had nothing to do with the topic I was discussing.
Kevin,
Watch out for dead horses and people that think.
And remember drive-bys produce the fewest challengable comments.
I haven’t seen the film, but want to. Not because I abide to any theory in particular - in my view whatever happened Big Bang, Evolution, etc. happened by God’s hand and will so how it happened is really of no importance to me. My interest in seeing the film it’s because it touches on the subject of Academic Censorship.
It used to be that a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, Academia was the bastion of ideas, tolerance and as researchers exploration.
Maybe theories of evolution, b/c that’s all they are theories (even Darwin’s is a theory) should not be part of the science curriculum and should be moved to a different class where all theories are presented. Sort of an epistemic class on evolution much like philosophy class go from Kant to Popper, from Hume to Kuhn.
In the end I will never understand all this bruhaha about teaching creationism, intelligent design and Darwin all in the same curriculum. I went to a Catholic school and we studied Darwin and had ample and lively discussion in class of evolution vs. creationism.
Frontpaging a piece that one can reliably predict will cause an uproar, then not opening comments is akin to pissing in the soup pot. Yeah, you got away with it. Yeah, you poisoned the discussion to the extent that no one will/can take part in it and therefore you cannot lose the argument.
That’s not much of a victory.
It does, however, both depreciate your reliability as one seeking to engage in true dialogue and really annoys those who don’t automatically agree with your point.
You won this ‘battle’ perhaps, but at the cost of at least one reader’s determination to ignore posts from Kevin D. in the future.
John,
An uproar that would have nothing, and did have nothing, to do with the topic at hand. Thank you for noting my wisdom.
As for poisoning the discussion, as I see it, the discussion being had had nothing to do with the documentary but rather what a crock people think ID is. I didn’t poison any discussion because that discussion never took place. So it’s kind of hard to blame me for “pissing in the soup pot” when there was never a pot involved.
I do expect you’ll excuse me for pissing, however. It is a natural biological function that I assume you yourself engage in from time to time.
As for ignoring my posts… feel free. I’m only taking to hear my own voice most times anyway.
Its worked out pretty well for me so far.
Typical biblethumper nonsense: “you may discuss the topic on my terms and my terms alone; if you deviate from that stricture you will be shunned.”
Bah.
I’m not watching Fahrenheit 911 either. What would be the point?
Seeing as you equate Ben Stein to Michael Moore I’ll take your “biblethumper nonsense” comment in the humorous tone it was clearly intended to be heard.
Almost tricked me on that one, you sly dog!
This is the kind of labeling, name calling, rejecting discussion out of hand attempt to annihilate opposing views that I really hate, no matter which side of the argument it comes from.
The NY Times calls Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, “One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time.”
Your wrong, therefore deserve no debate.
Of course, the NY Times also heaped praise upon Fahrenheit 9/11 so that should tell you something.
Depending upon your disposition toward the NT Times it probably confirms your suspicions about Expelled either way.
So, from my disposition about the NY Times, anything it slams is probably something I’m going to enjoy.
In the case of Expelled this little formula of mine proves to be accurate.
[…] his latest post, he tosses in a generous helping of the endlessly tiresome “see, I told you you’d all […]
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