Expelled - Ben Stein

There's a new film available in the States called Expelled, which aims to align Darwinism with Naziism, to disprove the theory of evolution and promote Intelligent Design, to claim that scientists and university lecturers who don't agree with evolution are sidelined in their careers.

Of course the film is being heavily promoted amongst Christians, especially on various evangelical sites and blogs. So I did some checking out, since part of the aim of this blog is source good DVD material for use in churches and amongst home groups. I started by watching (or trying to watch) the extended trailer, but for some reason it doesn't want to download properly. However I got enough of an idea of it to want to check out things further.

Ben Stein, who 'stars' in the movie (it's more a doco than a feature), is anti-Darwinism - not in itself a bad thing - and so are the producers of the movie. Clicking further back and forth across the web I eventually came across a writer who says he's a passionate moderate Christian who is a member of a United Methodist congregation. His name is Henry Neufield. Henry's no slouch, he's no fly-by-night blogger, and he seems pretty sane.

He slams the movie for six reasons:
It misrepresents evolution;
First amendment issues are badly confused;
Academic freedom doesn't guarantee you a job or tenure;
The problem for intelligent design is not that it hasn't been considered;
The connection of Hitler with evolution;
Lastly, the one that annoys me most, is the lie that accepting the theory of evolution is the equivalent of atheism.

I don't have space here to give the detail from Henry's post, so I recommend you check it out on his blog.

The Selfish Capitalist - Oliver James.

James is the author of Affluenza, which looked at the way in which greed is affecting our psyches, our souls. In his new book, (with its unfortunately uninspiring cover) he looks deeper into the origins of the 'virus' and outlines the political, economic and social climate in which it has grown.

Here's the opening of the book. (The remainder of this chapter can be found here.)

The modern vogue is to seek out evolutionary purposes for emotional distress. Because the theory of natural selection proposes that only those traits that have served an adaptive purpose survive, everything about us must have been adaptive at some point in our evolution (even if it no longer is helpful and, in theory, dying out) to have remained in our gene pool. The corollary is that everything about us must also be ultimately traceable back to our genetic inheritance, even traits which on the face of it are extremely maladaptive. Evolutionists pay virtually no attention to the considerable number of traits which might seem to be solely maladaptive, in terms of helping to reproduce genes. One might ponder why Down’s syndrome endures, why genetic abnormalities which guarantee extremely low intelligence continue, or even why homosexuality (if one assumes, as geneticists must do, that it has a genetic foundation) persists – whatever the other merits of this sexual orientation, reproduction is by definition not one of them. I am looking forward to the first evolutionary theory explaining why nuclear weapons or ecologically unsustainable economics, adaptations which may destroy all life on this planet, will further the reproduction of genes