Expelled: And Rightly So

Academic Freedom is a new favourite in creationist camps. The term certainly sounds like an admirable concept, but in truth this movement is a subtle attempt to lower academic standards in order to enable creationism to sneak into science classes. It is nothing but a PR move, a cunning rebranding of a real debate.

Under the banner of academic freedom, institutions are criticised for not allowing open debate between evolution and intelligent design. It is claimed that there are substantial flaws in the theory of evolution that intelligent design could be able to answer. However, everyone's favourite shadowy cabal, the scientists, are routinely destroying the careers of anyone who asks the justified question of whether the world has a designer, so that their ficticious fancy, evilution, can be propogated for some self-serving reason that nobody has deigned to tell us yet.

This was the premise of Ben Stein's artless propaganda-fest, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. This documentary (is it too cheap to call it a cock-umentary? Probably) tenaciously painted a picture of hard working academic after hard working academic being fired, ostracised and ridiculed for bringing up the possibility of design in front of their brainwashed darwinist peers. The film claims there is a debate to be had and the evolutionists aren't engaging with it, they're just expelling those who disagree with them.

Now, it has been demonstrated beyond any doubt that many of the 'expulsions' in the film were horribly exaggerated or simply made up. However, if any expulsions of this type have occured, I would argue they were deserved. Contrary to what these film makers, and the ID movement, would have us believe, the debate is not being stifled. The debate has already happened and been won. Intelligent design is not a valid theory.

The view that the world was created by a god is not a plucky, new, revolutionary idea, it has been the default position since as far back as history can tell us. It is only in the last couple of centuries that science has been able to show the errors of that position and present alternatives. Creationism has been evaluated and has been rightly discarded. It bears none of the necessary marks of a science: it is not observable, it is not testable, it is not falsifiable and it cannot make predictions. It is simply not helpful. Creationism is incompatible with science and therefore anyone who proposes an intelligent design explanation clearly does not understand the scientific position and should not be a scientist.

Let's say a hypothetical man were fired from a metaphorical cheese factory for proposing that they should sell cheese made from shit. He could complain that he had been unfairly dismissed without his ideas having been given a fair hearing. However, the factory owners know enough about cheese and shit not to need this worker to squat down in the board room and give them a specimin to try. From their experience in the dairy industry, they know that however long you churn shit, it will never turn into cheese. And even if it did, it wouldn't matter because nobody would want to eat it. Indeed, they would be justifiably worried about having someone working for them that evidently had such little understanding of the way cheese, and indeed shit, works.

In a round-about analogy sort of way, the ID-proposing biologist is very much like our shitty cheese eating employee. Though he may complain at the unfairness of the scientific world's apparent refusal to evaluate his ideas, the truth is that the debate has already moved on and any scientist who can't recognise that deserves to be expelled.