Friday, April 18, 2008

Morrissey Review's Ben Stein's Movie, Expelled

Ed Morrissey, writing on one of Michelle Malkin's side blogs, Hot Air, posts his review of a pre-screening of the upcoming move, Expelled, produced by Ben Stein.

Stein's movie, one that attempts to chronicle the rabid, intellectual intolerance of academia, is already making waves, and panicking the atheists as a going concern. My favorite quote from the review:


. . . In this, the film does an excellent job of demonstrating atheism as a belief system. Atheism as represented by Richard Dawkings and others in this film gets exposed as exactly the kind of belief system they claim to despise. They can’t prove God exists — and they can’t prove God doesn’t exist. They make the common fallacy of arguing that absence of evidence amounts to evidence of absence.

I always knew there was something inherently likable about that guy Stein. An affable personality attached to an ironclad faith. Something frequently mistaken for "intolerance" in and of itself.

-R

4 comments:

aahrens said...

Ron,
Read an artticle in Christianity Today about Stein's "Expelled." I really love it when people take on belief systems like atheism in a logical way in place of just beating them about the head with their Thompson Chain, while trying to rebuke the devil.

Your last line about intollerance really sums up the whole thing - as usual you level the detractors with one sentence.

AA

Anonymous said...

I loved Ben Stein's columns in the Spectator over the years but his film is troubling. His producers clearly deceived the scientists they were interviewing and have lied to their audiences about the way they handled it. Dawkins and company are clearly wrong (in my opinion) to say that biology leads inexorably to atheism, but deceptions and lies certaintly won't lead these guys and their readers to truth. Have you read http://www.expelledexposed.com/? Personally I suspect the involvement of the Unification Church in all of this film. It certainly bears their handprints.

Doofus said...

I just read an interview with Stein in World magazine, and he states that, while he did not fully lay out the film's plot, he did say that he was making a film about the intersection of the two belief systems.

If that is the case, then the scientists were not decieved. They simply did not realize that tipping their biases so openly would be so embarassing for them.

If I believe Acts 2:38 is the Gospel Truth, then there is no possible circumstance under which I would stste otherwise--even if a producer lied to me and said it would be an apostolic-friendly film. Even if it was a film meant to make apostolics look bad, I should certainly believe that I would give the same answer--whether it be to an apostolic filmmaker, or even Borat.

I'll check out the site.

-R

Anonymous said...

just saw Expelled... Ben Stein's goal in making Expelled (i gather) is to promote free thought, especially more thinking about motivations that drive American academia and a lot of other behind-the-scenes worldview that we tend to take for granted.