The Doctor and I enjoyed a rare and special honor last week. We got to see the movie Expelled in the same theatre where it was seen by the infamous Richard Dawkins! (But I wonder which of us enjoyed the film more?) It wasn’t something I was dying to see, but we were trapped for an afternoon at the mall, and as one who used to be quite attentive to the debate about Darwinism I thought I might enjoy seeing what Ben Stein did with the topic.

Having seen it, I would neither advise others to see it nor discourage them. If you want to enjoy cheap laughs at the expense of the minions of scientism (a perfectly respectable form of entertainment in my view), you should see it. If you mainly want to get some clarity on the crazy debate surrounding Darwinism, don’t. Mind you, I’m not calling Stein a liar. His most central point — that the academic community has systematically persecuted anyone who shows the least bit of sympathy with religiously-motivated critiques of Dawinism — is surely right. His evaluation of the science may be a little fuzzy. But at the end of the day, the debate about evolution gets into some very deep metaphysical questions, and there really wasn’t much chance that they were going to get neatly sorted out in a little film like this.

I’ve seen Expelled compared to a Michael Moore flick, and that is not inapt. Of course, Stein isn’t nearly as annoying and gross as Michael Moore, but his creation does have that same kind of punchy, over-the-top tendentiousness that is Moore’s trademark. Also, as in a Michael Moore film, you don’t end up feeling that he’s accomplished much by the end except to stir the muck a bit. Of course, in my view Stein’s creation has the signature advantage of at least touching on a number of true points. But there are a few annoyances even for a longtime anti-Darwin crusader like myself.

The first and most obvious is this: most of his complaints against the scientific establishment are lodged in the name of “free speech.” He shows how critics of Darwinism have been hounded out of their careers in academia and journalism, and suggests that this is the one noteworthy exception to America’s otherwise excellent record of valuing that wonderful gift, free speech. That was amusing on more than one level. In the first place, there’s nothing remotely exceptional about this case. All academic disciplines have their orthodoxies, and banishing dissenters is pretty standard. It may be tough to survive as a supporter of Intelligent Design in a biology department, but I bet it’s at least as hard to make it as a critic of postmodernism in English, or supporting a traditional view of marriage in a Women’s Studies department. If you want to find a place were free thought isn’t safe, a third-world dictatorship would probably be your best bet, but a modern university definitely get high marks.

Not that that’s necessarily, in itself, a bad thing. Of course I don’t care for most of what counts as orthodoxy in the modern-day academy, but in general terms, free speech wouldn’t exactly a core value for me anyway. The idea that anyone should be able to say whatever they want without danger of reprisals is a thoroughly modernist one. Of course, as I’ve said, modernists aren’t able to realize this goal any better than anyone else. In many respects I imagine the medieval university was considerably more intellectually “free” than what we’ve got today. As Catholics, though, we can understand that a totally free society, in the sense that Stein means it, is undesirable as well as impossible. In the end, a commitment to the truth is not really compatible with a commitment to a totally free marketplace of ideas. Errors should be rejected, and perhaps sometimes forcibly suppressed. There is a certain pleasure in pointing out when modernists are engaged in the suppression, since they normally claim not to approve of that sort of thing. In Expelled, though, it’s pretty clear that one modernist idea is being used against another.

Of course you can’t expect a movie like this to cover every aspect of a large and hairy debate, but I did think it a shame that Stein really only talked to representatives of the Intelligent Design movement. Really the Intelligent Design people represent only one branch of the many people who are publishing criticisms of evolutionary theory. It would have been nice to see some mention of other approaches — perhaps of scholars like John Haught and John Polkinghorne who argue for an evolution that is nonetheless not fully mechanistic. (As a philosopher I find this an intriguing and maybe promising approach to the problem. Perhaps I’ll write a more full post on the subject sometime.)

Perhaps the most-criticized portion of the movie is the part that, to my mind, might be really be the most profound, or at least the most useful for getting a “novice” thinking about the significance of the debate. Near the end of the film, Stein elaborates more on some of the philosophical views that have been linked to Darwinian theory, showing how scientific ideas about “survival of the fittest” have helped to inspire some shockingly depraved movements, including Nazism. He tours a “hospital” in which the Nazis “studied” and then gassed people who were too old, sick or disabled to work. He also draws connections to the eugenics movement in America, and to one of the remnants of that movement that still survives, Planned Parenthood. Stein acknowledges that not everyone who calls himself a “Darwinist” will necessarily be a supporter of such monstrous actions. Of course he still caused grave offense to all the expected people, but actually I thought this part was fairly well done. Though he makes it crudely, Stein has his finger on a true point — the work that comes out of this ostensibly scientific field is laden with philosophical presumptions. If you follow some of those assumptions out, they lead to some pretty horrific conclusions. Regrettably, some people have followed them out.

Anyone who is surprised to discover that the debate about evolution has significant philosophical elements is obviously pretty ignorant and/or confused. However, since a large percentage of Americans do seem to be in that position, there is a chance that this movie may actually serve to educate. I mostly enjoyed the time spent watching Expelled, and I certainly don’t mind that Stein made it. I expect it will do more good than harm (though I don’t know how many people will actually go see it.) Still, we really can’t really rely on movies like this to educate the public about what’s going on in the evolution debate. More people to pitch in to provide some better resources for clearing up the murky waters of this old but still-explosive debate.