Following the Living Way - Jesus Christ

"Expelled" and the right to be outraged

Have you seen the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" yet? It's a fantastic presentation of how the evolutionist scientific "establishment" has treated the Intelligent Design arguments. Five stars, highly recommended.

Here is an article about how some of the atheists, including Richard Dawkins, a very vocal presenter of atheism ("The God Delusion" is one of his recent works), were upset at the movie. They felt the filmmakers had deceived them because the original title of the film was different; they believed that the premise or focus of the movie was misrepresented and thus, they, the evolutionists, were asked to be interviewed under false pretenses.

I don't know if Ben Stein's film company misrepresented anything to the evolutionists; I hope not. However, my question to the evolutionists is this: if we are all evolved from a single celled organism in the distant past, and there is no Creator or God outside of the system, from Whom we get our sense of morality, then this universe (closed system) is all we have, and science is the only true realm of knowledge. How, then, can you justify being outraged? To be outraged, you must examine what has been done to you (the observable action) and compare it with an invisible standard of what should have been done to you.

The question is, where did you get this invisible standard? How can you define what should have been done to you? Where, scientifically, does this come from? How can you hypothesize about it, test it, measure it, and repeat it? If you only have non-directed evolution to explain your existence, your brainwaves, your thoughts, then do you really have a right to claim that a moral injustice has been perpetrated by Ben Stein's filmmakers? Where'd you get your moral standard on which to base your claim?

If atheistic evolution is true, then all's fair in love, war and the evolutionary process -meaning the totality of life on this planet. Thus, if Ben Stein & his crew deceived the atheists, they had every right (according to atheistic evolution) to do so. Perhaps that's just part of the next stage in human evolution - deceiving others for profit or other motive. Who are the complaining atheists to stand in the way of evolutionary progress - even if that progress involves lying to the atheists?

The fact is, the atheists don't have a leg to stand on. To affirm atheistic evolution, they must deny the existence of an overall, intangible (or "spiritual") standard of morality, apart from the evolutionary process. (And if morality is just a part of the evolutionary process, then we should actually celebrate deviations from that morality, because deviations, in the form of mutations, are the way that evolution moves forward). Yet to justify feeling outraged, they must accept an overarching moral standard which should apply equally to them and to Ben Stein, and claim that Stein violated that standard by deceiving them.

In short, they're in a philosophical mess. And that's the point of the movie.

posted by Rob @ 9:41 AM