BEFORE: We waited out the blizzard at my parents' house and drove back to Queens today - the highway was mostly clear, but it seems that New York City Sanitation gave up and only plowed a portion of the streets, so we had to park four blocks from our house, and had to slog through the snow with our luggage and Christmas gifts - thanks a lot, Mayor Bloomberg! I'm continuing with religion-based documentaries, but tonight's film is sort of the opposite point of view from last night's, with intelligent design standing in for creationism.
THE PLOT: Ben Stein examines the issue of academic freedom and decides that there is none when it comes to the debate over intelligent design.
AFTER: There's a lot of repetition in this film - THIS teacher was fired for teaching intelligent design, and THIS reporter was told not to mention it in an article, and then THIS one, and so on...
But interviewer Ben Stein then makes some large leaps in logic, pointing out the Nazis' use of Darwinism to justify their terrible actions - however, this does not mean that today's believers in evolution have beliefs similar to Nazis. It's a cheap shot, evoking the concentration camps, which also clouds the issue.
It's probably just that most scientists seem to not be very religious people, and vice versa, which is actually quite comforting to me. The most science-oriented people, at least the ones depicted in this film, have found the existence of God to be incompatible with their studies and research - so Ben Stein, here sticking up for the Old Testament God, is not preaching to the choir, but instead doing the opposite.
There are a lot of shots of Stein traveling to interviews, which to me seems like a great metaphor - he's constantly on the road to a point, but never quite gets there. I'm all for academic freedom, but science and religion are more like magnets with opposite charges than, say, peanut butter and chocolate.
Both Bill Maher and Ben Stein want the members of their "silent majorities" to start coming forward and speaking up, which raises the question - which group is bigger, with more potential as a voting bloc - the quiet atheists, or the scientific creationists?
RATING: 3 out of 10 dinosaur skeletons
>>>It's probably just that most scientists seem to not be very religious people, and vice versa, which is actually quite comforting to me.<<<
ReplyDeleteTo me as well. Going back to the previous movie, "Religulous," the statistic that Bill Maher pointed out was that 93% of scientists (I can't remember the name of the organization that was polled) were either agnostic or atheist. A very comforting thought.