Expelled

The other night I saw the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

I left the theater reminded of Mary McCarthy’s famously hyperbolic condemnation of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

Expelled was, as one would expect, an attempt to put forward the familiar, but patently false, idea that there is a serious debate within the scientific world between advocates of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and “intelligent design.” As its title indicates, the film’s particular twist is the claim that scientists are being fired, or denied tenure, or losing research funding, merely for taking seriously, let alone believing in, intelligent design.

So far as I’m able to ascertain—not being personally involved in any of the events in question, but relying on sources I take to be prima facie reliable—the accounts of alleged persecution are for the most part presented with cynical contempt for the truth. However, the sources I regard as reliable generally are the voice of the very scientific establishment that the film charges with conspiring to suppress the evidence for intelligent design and silence its proponents.

So the important question to ask is: What if scientists were penalized for being involved in intelligent design? Would this be warranted, reasonable, and in keeping with professional ethics? Or, as the movie strenuously insists, would this be irrational and unethical persecution of these beleaguered individuals by the desperate defenders of a theory in trouble?

Among the cases the movie presents, the one that comes closest to plausibility is that of astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, who in 2007 was denied tenure at Iowa State University. Although the official reasons given for the denial of tenure make no mention of Gonzalez’ involvement in the intelligent design movement, the allegation that this was taken into account by those who turned him down is at least not obviously false. He did submit his intelligent design promoting book, Privileged Planet, as one of the publications for his tenure evaluation. So assume, for the sake of argument, that this professor was denied tenure in virtue of his adherence to intelligent design. Would this be objectionable?

A principal theme of Expelled is that it would be objectionable, indeed, it would be un-American, since we have a right to free speech that such penalties violate. (In fact, an aim of the film is to inspire support for “academic freedom” legislation designed to give proponents of intelligent design the platform their peers in the scientific world deny them.) One need only state the assumption that imposing sanctions on a scientist for what he says or writes is a violation of his right to free speech to see its absurdity. What scientists teach and write is subject to critical evaluation by their academic peers and, if it falls short of the standards of the relevant discipline, they are rightly subject to various sanctions: the individual might not be hired, not tenured, not promoted, not published, or not granted funds for research. As an American citizen, Gonzalez has a legal right to say pretty much whatever he pleases, irrespective of the quality of the evidence—if any—for his claims and irrespective of the quality of the scientific reasoning—if any—that he adduces on their behalf. However, if, e.g., he were to publish a book contending that the planets and stars are embedded in crystal spheres that move around a fixed earth, his colleagues would not violate his right to free speech were they to judge him unqualified as an astronomer and decide that he should ply his trade elsewhere. The right to free speech does not entail a right to be tenured when your colleagues believe you propagate bogus science.

So, let’s again move to the interesting question, which is whether the academy’s “punishment”—whether real or imaginary—of advocates of intelligent design, could be justified. What’s on reflection salient to anyone who sits through Expelled is that this crucial question is simply ignored. We are repeatedly told that there is a great controversy sundering the scientific world, and that those on one side of it are unjustly persecuting those on the opposing side, but we are offered not a single example of the scientific evidence that has created this crisis. Surprisingly absent are the usual claims about “irreducible complexity;” even the famous bacterium flagellum has motored out of sight. Although William Dembski figures prominently, “specified complexity” and natural selection’s inability to achieve it is merely alluded to. There is no attempt to make the case. What the movie offers instead is supposed experts confidently telling us that evolution obviously is a theory in crisis, and that many in the scientific community have grave doubts about Darwinism, but for fear of persecution reveal these doubts only when suitably inebriated. (I’m not making this up.) The informed viewer knows that this is close to being the exact opposite of the truth, that the case for the neo-Darwinian synthesis is today stronger than it has ever been, and that confidence in it among the scientifically informed (at least when they are sober) is at an all time high. This does not entail that evolutionary theory is true, but it does entail that the main claim of Expelled is false. The uninformed viewer will not notice, and I assume is intended not to notice, that most of those telling us that evolutionary biology is a theory in crisis are philosophers or mathematicians, not scientists, let alone biologists, let alone evolutionary theorists. However, the wells are well poisoned: the complete absence of substantive evidence for the alleged crisis and controversy is implicitly enlisted as evidence of the conspiracy of silence and the effective supression of dissent.

I have so far referred only to the first half of the movie. The second half passes beyond garden variety intellectual dishonesty into sheer propaganda. It features Ben Stein wandering through Nazi death camps, promoting the idea that this is where Darwinism leads. Between the film’s beginning and end Darwinism mutates from a possibly faulty theory some scientists are in trouble for questioning to an unmitigated evil that threatens civilization. Along the way we are told that Darwinism implies there is no God, no morality, and no freedom. All this is put forward as simply obvious, with no regard for reason or history. Particularly egregious is an attempt to show that Darwin himself supported what later became eugenics by means of a patchwork quotation from a passage in which he says the opposite.


Unlike Ben Stein, the film’s star and narrator, most of those who advocate for “intelligent design” are evangelical Christians. As a colleague pointed out to me, the typical viewer, hearing highly educated and articulate fellow Christians confidently describing the great conflict in science and the evil conspiracy to hide it, will find it impossible to believe they are not telling the truth. And that, I think, leads to the serious question: Why have evangelical Christians, who are not always merely moralistic but often actually moral, concluded that dishonesty is permissible? Why has it become O.K. to lie for Jesus?

I believe that the “intelligent design” movement has been a disaster for Christianity. Prior to the 1990’s most secular academics were dimly aware of old-style creationism, something associated with the Scopes trial and the benighted fundamentalism of rural America. The intelligent design movement changed this. Its proponents had the credentials and wherewithal to seek a “place at the table” and get their ideas under discussion in respectable academic circles. (My view is that by and large, the secular academic establishment bent over backwards in an effort to give them a fair hearing.) These ideas received the respectful, but highly critical, treatment that was their due. However, the debate did not evolve in the normal matter, with each side paying heed to the arguments of the other side and trying its best to respond honestly to them. Instead, so far as most academics were concerned, the issue rather quickly became not the issues themselves, but the evasiveness, obscurantism, and downright dishonesty of the anti-evolution side. In the eyes of the intelligentsia, Christian critics of evolutionary theory are shockingly willing to prevaricate for their cause. This was, no doubt, exacerbated by the blatantly dishonest attempt to introduce intelligent design into the public schools as a supposedly non-religious alternative to Darwinism. One reads the court documents of Fitzmiller v. Dover Area School District appalled at the willingness of evangelical Christians to commit perjury in the effort of get a mere nod to intelligent design into the science classrooms.

The film Expelled is simply the latest, and a particularly sordid, instance of the forces opposed to evolution presenting a mendacious face to the world. Yet many of those opposed to what contemporary science tells us about human origins are good, honest people. Why do good people tell lies? Many, of course, are not lying but merely repeating what people they trust have told them, people who are, in turn, sincerely repeating falsehoods they have heard from sources they trust. But at some point the trail leads to those who surely know better. Why do these presumably otherwise honest persons judge that deceit is acceptable when it comes to the theory of evolution?

The closest I’ve been able to come to grasping this is the analogy of the district attorney who is utterly convinced of the guilt of a suspect, but frustrated with a judicial system that makes it impossible to convict him with the admissible evidence. As we know, otherwise ethical individuals in these situations sometimes go wrong, suppressing exonerating evidence and even fabricating evidence against the culprit. Such wrongdoing, they feel sure, is justified if that's what it takes to keep a dangerous criminal off the street. Maybe individuals like the makers of Expelled are so convinced of the “guilt” of Darwin, Dawkins, and their ilk that they feel justified in dealing with them and their ideas deceitfully.

Beyond this, the paradigmatic situation in which ethical people believe dishonesty is permissible, or even obligatory, is war. In a just war, it can be permissible to lie to, and tell lies about, your enemy. Perhaps what we’re now seeing is an ugly effect of the “culture wars” mentality. This could explain the surreal disregard for the truth that has come to characterize religious opponents of science. They see themselves at war with the horrendous evil of Darwinism, a war in which everything is at stake and “all’s fair.” It’s perfectly O.K. to deceive Dawkins and other interviewees about the nature of the film, just as it’s perfectly O.K. to ascribe to Darwin views plainly opposed to his actual words, it’s perfectly O.K. to distort the facts about proponents of intelligent design being fired or denied grants, and it’s perfectly O.K. to proffer a totally fictional account of the current status of evolutionary theory in the scientific community. However, what this deplorable business has to do with faithful Christian witness is, obviously enough, precisely nothing.

Don Wacome

Professor of Philosophy