AAAS is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science, as well as many scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programs that raise the bar of understanding for science worldwide.

AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion facilitates communication between scientific and religious communities. The program builds on AAAS's long-standing commitment to relate scientific knowledge and technological development to the purposes and concerns of society at large. Link to the AAAS Dialogue  See also their Evolution Resources

Below is the opening of their official statement: "Regarding the Importance of the Integrity of Science as Depicted in Film"

Review Essay by Jeffrey P. Schloss (PhD, Washington University), Center for Faith, Ethics, and Life Sciences, Westmont College, California.

I.   Seeking an Open Inquiry

II.   Is Evolution Wedded to Atheism?

III.  Do “anti-science bigots stifle science”?

IV. Did Darwin Lead to Hitler?

V.  Breaking Down or Putting up Walls?

Opening paragraphs:

I.  Seeking an Open Inquiry

The movie Expelled has attracted national attention as the most recent and explosive salvo in the battle – sometimes represented as a scientific conflict, sometimes as an all out culture war – over evolution, divine design, and the treatment of these issues in American academia.  Critics of the movie and the Intelligent Design (ID) movement it represents view the campaign as part of a “holy war on science,” that in many respects involves the intellectual analog of terrorism.  Having failed to gain ground in a fairly-waged battle for ideas amongst scientific colleagues, ID advocates are criticized as circumventing the rules of honest intellectual engagement by going straight to school boards and legislators.  Having failed there, they are now viewed as resorting to a propaganda campaign of misinformation and vilification.  

Expelled and the ID advocates it portrays would agree that the battle hasn’t been fairly fought, but attribute this not to their tactics but those of a “Dark Age of totalitarianism” that silences dissent through “Kafkaesque persecution of scientists” and others who challenge the system.  Expelled portrays those who champion ID or stand up to Darwinism as freedom fighters, struggling against an oppressive intellectual regime that, while it may control the reins of power, does not represent either sound reason or popular sensibilities.  The film “exposes the tactics that Darwinists employ to maintain their stranglehold on academia and the scientific establishment.” In fact, it even closes with stirring words from the Declaration of Independence and a celebration of those brave warriors who have given their lives in the fight to preserve the legacy of American freedoms.   Producer Ben Stein concludes, “Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science.”

Over the course of this increasingly polarized battle, and especially in the bitter criticisms and umbraged defenses of the film, each side contends that the other not only is wrong, but also is committing the destructive error of the above proverb. [It was taken, by the way, from the famous discussion by Nobel laureate biologist Konrad Lorenz of “militant enthusiasm” – the feverish group think in which “rational  considerations,  criticisms,  and  all  reasonable arguments…are silenced” by being made to “appear not only untenable but base and dishonorable.”]   For many of us who value science, biblical faith, and civil exchange, it is very tempting to echo Mercutio’s lament at the tragic consequences of feuding Montagues and Capulets: “A plague on both your houses!...I was hurt under your arm.”  Indeed, our students, and the fabric of social discourse,  and the very intellectual questions that have been central to western civilization all appear to have been injured “under the arm” of this feud.

But not so fast with a plea for moderation.  If it is important to avoid the fallacy of false extremes, it is also important to avoid the fallacy of the supposedly golden median.  Maybe we need, as lifetime Darwin critic Tom Bethell claims in his movie review,  to “reject what might be called the diplomatic option, [which] seeks to keep everyone happy” by seeing reconcilable truths on both sides.  For in so doing “it puts diplomacy before truth.”  It is of course possible that one side is just plain wrong, not only in claims but also in tactics.  For this reason, it is crucial both to hear sympathetically and to assess carefully the film’s claims.  It is especially important for Christians to do this, for the internal coherence of our faith and the integrity of our social witness are at stake.

What I want to do in this review essay is carefully assess the claims of the film, plus those made in the recent firestorm of criticisms and defenses.  It is not targeted at scholars, but it is offered to the thoughtful.  “Is there no shorter way of coming to Geometry…?” King Ptolemy is reputed to have asked Euclid.  “Sire, there is no royal road to geometry.”  Polemical soundbites criticizing and defending the movie notwithstanding, there is no short way to the truth of these issues.  While the following assessment is lengthy, it contains segments dealing with each major claim of the film, which may be read separately.

Before examining the specific claims of the film and its critics, I should make explicit two starting commitments that virtually all Christians will bring (and atheists will reject) in coming to the issues.  First, along with all monotheists in the Abrahamic traditions, Christians believe that the earth and the history of humanity are not the accidental byproducts of a purposeless cosmos, but the creation of a wise and loving God.  Moreover, God has not left Himself without witness, but His creation bears wondrous testimony of its Creator (in ways not all agree on).  Second, and this is a somewhat distinctive and contentious claim of the Christian revelation: human beings are prone to misidentifying the signature of divine artistry, and in fact may actively work to deny it.  The scandalous message of the incarnation is that even when the Artist himself entered his creation, its interlocking systems of thought and power not only failed to recognize him, but also despised him.  No disrespect intended, but in a sense Christianity is the ultimate conspiracy theory, involving the disturbing proposal that the self-deceiving vulnerabilities of human personality and the self-justifying mechanisms of cultural control are tilted away from God’s testimony, and are largely blind to the direction of this tilt.

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NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENCE EDUCATION

"Creationists have been making the same arguments for decades," says Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education.  "They've gotten better at marketing these claims, but they're no more valid now than during the Scopes trial of the 1920s.  Creationists have been predicting the death of evolution for over a century, yet it is constantly affirmed by evidence from fields Darwin could never have imagined."  Given the damning assessment at www.ExpelledExposed.com, Scott adds, "Perhaps the filmmakers should have spent more time hitting the books, instead of beating up on hardworking scientists."

Throughout the movie, Ben Stein claims that "Big Science" represses intelligent design to advance an atheistic agenda, but Peter Hess, from NCSE's Faith Outreach Project, doesn't buy it.  "There are many successful evolutionary biologists who are also people of faith," he observes, "and a host of people of faith who regard intelligent design as a misconceived and harmful rejection of science.  In attempting to pit Christianity against science, Expelled misrepresents both."

"We reviewed public records and reports on the intelligent design promoters who were supposedly discriminated against, and we discovered that the claims that they lost their jobs over intelligent design are unsupported," explains Josh Rosenau, a biologist at NCSE.  "That said, professors who aren't making advances in their field, editors who disregard their journal's established practices, and lecturers who repeat creationist falsehoods shouldn't be surprised if they have trouble holding jobs.  These people weren't expelled; they flunked out."  www.ExpelledExposed.com contains information about the "martyrs" from Expelled, and also of real scientists who successfully challenged established science.  "The difference," NCSE researcher Carrie Sager observes, "is that real scientists back their challenges with experimental results.  Results are what changed minds, forced textbook revisions, and earned Nobel Prizes."

More insidious are the movie's attempts to link evolution to the Holocaust.  Susan Spath, a historian of science at NCSE, comments:  "The implication that Darwin led to Nazism and the Holocaust is an irresponsible misrepresentation of a terrible history.  Hitler abused many things, including science, and Expelled is wrong to shift blame off his shoulders and onto evolution."  www.ExpelledExposed.com quotes the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman, who described similar claims in a previous creationist movie as "an outrageous and shoddy attempt ... to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust."

The National Center for Science Education is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools.  The NCSE maintains its archive of source material on the history of creationism at its Oakland, California, headquarters.  On the web at www.ncseweb.org.  www.ExpelledExposed.comis a resource for journalists, teachers, and curious moviegoers who want the full story behind Expelled.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...about intelligent design and evolution.

By John Rennie and Steve Mirsky. Scientific American, April 16, 2008

In the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, narrator Ben Stein poses as a "rebel" willing to stand up to the scientific establishment in defense of freedom and honest, open discussion of controversial ideas like intelligent design (ID). But Expelled has some problems of its own with honest, open presentations of the facts about evolution, ID—and with its own agenda. Here are a few examples...

1) Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust.

2) Ben Stein's speech to a crowded auditorium in the film was a setup.

3) Scientists in the film thought they were being interviewed for a different movie.

4) The ID-sympathetic researcher whom the film paints as having lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution was never an employee there.

5) Science does not reject religious or "design-based" explanations because of dogmatic atheism.

6) Many evolutionary biologists are religious and many religious people accept evolution.

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KEN MILLER: EXPELLED EXCORIATED

Miller, a supporter of NCSE, is a professor of biology at Brown University, the coauthor of the most widely used high school biology textbook in the United States, and the author of Finding Darwin's God and the forthcoming Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, which Publishers Weekly (April 14, 2008) described as "thoroughly enjoyable and informative." 

Writing in the Boston Globe (May 8, 2008), Kenneth R. Miller blasts the creationist propaganda film Expelled, writing, "American science is in trouble, and if you wonder why, just go to the movies.  Popular culture is gradually turning against science, and Ben Stein's new movie, 'Expelled,'

is helping to push it along."  "There are many things wrong with this movie," Miller observes, citing not only its errors of fact but also its deliberate misrepresentation of science as atheistic:  "showing a scientist who accepts both God and evolution would have confused their story line."

Moreover, Miller continues, "by far the film's most outlandish misrepresentation is its linkage of Darwin with the Holocaust.  A concentration camp tour guide tells Stein that the Nazis were practicing 'Darwinism,' and that's that.  Never mind those belt buckles proclaiming Gott mit uns (God is with us), the toxic anti-Semitism of Martin Luther, the ghettoes and murderous pogroms in Christian Europe centuries before Darwin's birth."  (The Anti-Defamation League similarly condemned Expelled for misappropriating the Holocaust.)

After quoting Expelled's spokesman Ben Stein's bizarre claim that "Science leads you to killing people," Miller concludes, "'Expelled' is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card.  It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself.  Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science."

ROGER EBERT's JOURNAL

Win Ben Stein's Mind. Posted December 3, 2008

The popular film critic Roger Ebert reviewed the creationist propaganda movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in a December 2008 post on his blog on the Chicago Sun-Times website — and he pulled no punches. "The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics," he wrote.

"This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion," he added.

"And there is worse, much worse," Ebert continued, taking especial offense at Expelled's claim that the acceptance of evolution resulted in the Holocaust — "It fills me with contempt." Previously, the Anti-Defamation League said that the movie's claim "is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry."

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