The Expelled exposure continues

The reviews of the creationist propaganda film Expelled continue to roll in, pointing again to the vast intellectual dishonesty, fundamental vacuity, and offensive arguements of the movie. I find this review, by Ken Hanke, to be one of the most notable (and amusing).
And over at National Review Online, John Derbyshire steps in with his own condemnation of Expelled, noting the fundamental dishonesty of the entire intelligent design movement. He also points out that science is a unique product of Western civilization, and as such, calls the film’s spurious and repulsive attempt to blame Darwin for the Holocaust “a blood libel on Western Civilization” (expanding on the comment by blogger Andrew Mazels calling that argument “essentially a blood libel against science”):

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

It’s a lengthy and reasoned post, and I reccommend it in particular to those readers of politically conservative leanings (like myself).

Tags: Ben Stein, Creationism, Evolution, Expelled, Holocaust, John Derbyshire, movie, NRO, Propaganda, review