"Expelled"

I follow the evolution vs. creation controversy quite avidly.

As you can guess, being a die-hard atheist, I prefer to take the side of the crushing, overwhelming consensus developed from scientific evidence. That is to say: life on earth in all of its forms evolved from a common ancestor mainly through a process called natural selection which worked on the somewhat random variation in genetic material caused by mutation.

That's not a perfect definition, especially the "random" part. I'm sure an actual evolutionary biologist could describe it more succinctly. All I ever did was share a basement apartment with some world-famous evolutionary biologist guy in university. But it does, I think, capture the essence of what reams of evidence tell us.

The other side of this "debate" is called "creationism" and has no scientific basis, or even any evidence at all, in its favour. Creationism is the idea that god created the universe in six days (young earth creationism) or several million years (old earth creationism) or last Thursday (Last Thursdayism).

Support for Creationism consists of a few logically flawed techniques:
a) misquoting evolutionary biologists
b) pointing to gaps in scientific knowledge (especially gaps in the fossil record) as if incomplete knowledge proves falsity
c) making arguments from ignorance
d) conflating evolution, or "belief in evolution", with various moral evils.

It is this last one, using the (apparent) consequences of believing something as an indication of its truth or falsity, of which a new film by Ben Stein and Mark Mathis is guilty.

For info on what a ridiculous movie this "Expelled" is, head on over to the NCSE's Expelled Exposed website.

These two jerks, and whoever knowingly participated in this movie, attempt to tell us that evolution is responsible for the Holocaust.

Yeah, they stoop that low.

Anti-semitism apparently doesn't have a centuries old root in the teachings of the Christian churches. No, no. Darwin started it all. If it weren't for "Darwinism" (by which they mean modern evolutionary theory) Hitler and his boys never even would have thought about wiping out all those Jews, Gypsies, diabetics, epileptics and whoever else didn't fit in with their eugenics program. Yeah, it was all evolution.

It's enough to make me sick, and I've only heard about the movie.

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