A Few Words of Common Sense about Expelled and Evolution

The one thing that Ben Stein's Expelled and the Theory of Evolution have in common is that they get some things right but are guilty of sloppy overreaching claims.

There isn't much point in debating someone's belief system, whether it's evolution or intelligent design. Faith is at the heart of any belief system which fits a particular worldview, whether it be a Creator designed world or one that was produced as a result of a multi-billion year game of evolutionary solitaire.

Now there's no doubt that Expelled gets some things right and that animals adapt to their environment and that such adaptation can be favorable in the genetic lottery. But the Nazis were not the product of Darwin and life on earth and the full scope of earth's biological diversity was not produced as a result of a genetic lottery that is the equivalent of putting a billion monkeys in a room with a billion typewriters and waiting a billion years until they produce Shakespeare.

The problem at the heart of it all is a misconception of what science is. In its practical applications science can be a handy tool for systematizing knowledge and opening up new directions of exploration that yields techniques and technologies. In its grand theorizing science mainly reflects the current beliefs and attitudes of the time. Science is not an absolute, its grand theories are a reflection of its own scientific orthodoxy and of the dominant philosophies in the academic culture at the time.

In its naked form science is more a series of perspectives than an answer. Like all perspectives, it is sometimes right and it is sometimes wrong. But its perspectives reflect "Us" more than it reflects the universe. Which means that in the end any scientific answers can only be as absolute, as broad and as correct as we humans are.

Science is only the means people use to try and answer questions and the bigger the questions are, the more tenuous any such answer can be. We can use science to answer simple questions reliably, but the more we move beyond testable hypothesis and into the realm of philosophy, using science to try to answer questions about the origins of life, about events that took place long before any of us were around, becomes nothing more than arrogance.

Evolution and the Big Bang are answers to the big questions, but not absolute ones. They are creation stories that are as much the product of philosophy as they are of science. They are the origin stories that a portion of our society tells itself in order to understand where it came from without subscribing to a religious based answer. The only difference between Creationism and the Big Bang and Evolution theories is the percentage of the academic community that embraces them origin stories.

Most everyone will admit this. The only real division is that those who believe that their answers are provable. But what provable means to them is that the answers are consistent with existing theories and hypothesis. The grand theories of science are little more than a tall tower of cards rising into the sky. Each level of the tower is the product of one generation of scientific orthodoxy. The provable theories of the next generation are those which shore up the instabilities and gaps of the previous level.

Does your theory about the universe overestimate its mass? Just invent more mass. Call it invisible hidden undetectable mass that makes up most of the universe. Or as we popularly know it, Dark Matter.

No you needn't waste time actually proving its existence. It exists because it fills a hole in a popular scientific theory. And the big theories are full of "Dark Matter", full of handy placeholders that can never be proven and that serve no other function except to prop up another shaky level of the house of science. As a result theoretical physics has long ago passed Science Fiction and moved into the realm of the truly absurd. But that doesn't matter, the big theories are mostly placeholders themselves, pieces of "Dark Matter" that became embedded in the academic orthodoxy.

The Big Bang has as much credibility as "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" does, without which none of the numbers would add up. The Theory of Evolution is a typical human error of projecting observation of current behavior into an origin story. The difference between the Theory of Evolution and a Cargo Cult is that evolutionists have had a much larger scale on which to make their tribal error and much greater sophistication which to justify and perpetuate it.

Once upon a time both were theories placeholders until they became the islands around which the newer theories began to form and then they went from theory to fact. The Theory of Evolution itself has evolved toward greater complexity but all of that complexity has left it spread thin and it takes a great deal of "Dark Matter" to shore up the gaping holes in its superstructure. And in the Meme Wars, the ideological competition of human beliefs, the Theory of Evolution is already a dinosaur left over from when Queen Victoria sat on her throne, Jack the Ripper prowled the streets of London and the great debate over fairies and spirits had captured the imagination of the public. A dinosaur that must compete with the great behemoths that have dominated human beliefs for thousands of years.

As a human product, science is as fallible as human beings are. The standards of proof it bases itself on are internal to the field, rather than external. But the integrity of a belief system always depends on its internal consistency, not its external consistency. Which is why the debate over evolution is fated to go nowhere. It consists of two voices which overlap in the public sphere, a clash of cultures. Because Academic origin theories of life gain educational sanction, while religious ones do not.

Up until very recently most academics believed in the inferiority of certain races. Some still do, but most have stopped believing in that-- not because it has been disproven, but because it has become unpopular.

This isn't to say that academics are racists, just that they are a reflection of the rest of us. Their beliefs are a reflection of the society they live in. Their ideas are just as fallible as any human ideas can be. There are questions that human science can answer and there are questions it cannot. When scientists claim to have definitive answers about events that supposedly took place millions and billions of years before anyone with scientific training was around to observe them, they make a mockery of the premises of their own field. And in presuming to answer those questions, science passes from a servant to a master. And it is wise to beware of the sort of masters one chooses for oneself.

None of this however means that the path to Auschwitz was laid by science or by evolution.

The Nazis were led by sociopaths and frauds who packaged together a byzantine grab bag of philosophies and ideas in order to appeal to everyone bringing together Paganism, Science and Christianity, Socialism and Capitalism into one bundle. The Nazi leadership consisted of homosexuals and perverts who postured as the defenders of traditional morality, attempted to reconcile Aryan Pagan Nationalism with Christian Conservatism, appealed to the workers as Socialists and to the factory owners as Capitalists.

Darwinism was only another card in a large deck of beliefs that the Nazi leadership toyed with, dealt out and mixed together in this way-- extracting the ugliest part of it for their own purposes. Just as they had done with Christianity itself, sifting out everything but the rabid anti-semitism for their own exploitation. The Nazi use of Darwinism is as representative of Darwinism as their use of Christianity is representative of Christianity. The Nazis were Christians when it pleased them, Pagans when it didn't. They were Socialists when they wanted to be and Capitalists when they wanted to be. The only consistent Nazi belief was in their right to power and to create a master race in their own image and they used whatever ideology or creed came to hand in order to propagandize this agenda.

It is doubtless convenient to attack Evolutionary theory with the club of Nazi eugenics. Just as it is convenient for Atheists to batter Christians with the widespread German Church support of Nazism. Both can play at that cynical game and often do. I however rather wish they wouldn't. There is in any case plenty of guilt to go around it for those who want it.

German Science and German Christianity were nothing more than reflections of Germany and when Germans fell in line behind Hitler, both Church and University were harnessed to serve the Nazi aims. Those who dissented were driven out, exiled or killed. In the end it is not so much our beliefs that characterize us, but we who characterize our beliefs.