Home
search
more | tips
Filter: Hide Spoilers:
Page 1 of 26:[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [Next]
Index 256 comments in total 

335 out of 606 people found the following comment useful :-
Amusing Propaganda - Title accurate description of Movie, 19 April 2008
1/10
Author: mtnmann from New Jersey, USA

No Intelligence Allowed describes the movie content rather well. The movie demonstrates NOT suppression of alternative ideas, but a failure to recognize the difference between science and philosophy. The term Darwinism is just a convenient way of making a science, backed up by 200 years of evidence, look like a philosophy or a "religion".

The number of times that logical fallacies are committed in this film is mind boggling. For instance, it equates evolution theory with Atheism, which it then equates with Hilter (not an Atheist) and Stalin. Even if these false conclusions were true, they have no bearing on the theory of evolution. The movie never makes a decent case for showing evolution as false, and as another website has pointed out so well: Not Expelled, Flunked.

Science is science and it boils down to "Show me the money". The reason that the so called Persecuted scientists are no longer working at those institutions is because they were practicing something other than science, not because they were making a valid scientific point that contradicted evolution or other evidence based theories.

Please - see the movie if you like, but with a critical eye. There should be no "Suspension of disbelief" since this is supposed to be a documentary. It is full of propaganda and lacks an honest approach. Its rather amazing that they were actually so transparent in their attempts to make their point. This movie flunks as a documentary.

Was the above comment useful to you?

166 out of 285 people found the following comment useful :-
Do The People Who Believe in Intelligent Design Really Think That It's Right to Slander and Lie?!, 1 May 2008
1/10
Author: tonymurphylee from USA

I am still waiting for a documentary that explains Intelligent Design in a way that makes sense and uses logic rather than incredible leaps in fantasy. The thing is, I don't think that it is possible to explain Intelligent Design in a way that is logical and makes sense. I have read literally thousands of different theories, essays, letters, and papers all explaining all kinds of different theories behind Intelligent Design and none of them have made a lick of sense. Now, for those of you who don't know what the theory of Intelligent Design is, it is the possibility that the reason why we are here is because God had crafted and allowed his world to morph and form into the world we have today. Darwin's theory of Evolution, on the other hand, is the possibility that humans are decedents of other forms of evolved forms of living beings based on millions of years of research based on bone formation, Pre-evolutionary concepts, and fossils. I was raised a strict Christian. When I was younger, I read the bible daily. I would pray every morning, night, and afternoon, I taped passages from the Bible to my notebooks in school, and I was always told about the great things that Jesus did and said. I always dressed in a suit and I always recited the bible and lived by the life lessons that I read about. Whenever life got really rough, I stuck by my faith and stuck through all the complications knowing that Jesus would have done the same in his infinite patience and understanding of human behavior. I could argue that I've read the bible more than any religious person I know. It wasn't until I took the time to learn things from a separate perspective that I learned of the Intelligent Design theory. Upon reading this, I slowly came to realize that my ideas about how the earth was created and how the humans came to be were completely nonsensical. I desperately searched for some way around the Intelligent Design theory and only grew more confused. I began to have religious friends who told me that everything in the bible about what Jesus's feelings about poor people and gay people was wrong and that they were all sinners. I slowly came to realize that they couldn't be sinners as they were just being themselves. I met so many religious people with varied opinions and ideas about the bible. Maybe it's because I wasn't a child who was sheltered by his parents, was constantly lied to about the bible, and had to go through home school, but I lost my faith and became an Atheist. Anyway, I've been trying to find something about Intelligent Design that is scientifically feasible. I was hoping that EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED would spell it all out for me, but instead, it deeply offended me. Instead of explaining to me anything honest about Intelligent Design, it misquotes, misinterprets, and straight out lies about the Darwinist theory. It uses the Darwinist theory as the theory that has led to Abortion, Atheism, Murder, the Holocaust and the Nazis, and fascism. These are all things that could be proved wrong by anybody who paid any attention in History class, knows anything about religion, and uses common sense. So, as a result of it's lies, misquotations, and misinterpretations, it becomes straight out propaganda. Propaganda is something that I am highly against and something that I feel has done nothing but poisoned the human race that is capable of so much. To me, propaganda is as low as a person can go in film-making. So, not only do I not recommend this film to anybody who believes in the theory of evolution, but I also don't recommend it to the respectable people who believe only in Intelligent Design, for it is dishonest, cheap, and repulsive. It is a disgrace to call this a documentary. It is a disgrace to call this film-making. I do not blame narrator Ben Stein, director Nathan Frankowski, or renowned Atheist Richard Dawkins. I blame the people who make up such nonsense and misappropriates all of the men, women, and children who have died as a result of religious dictatorship. As of now, this is the worst film I have ever seen.

Pros:

-the film has a sense of humor

-some interesting interview footage with scientists

Cons:

-This film commits a number of documentary film making sins! This film is a perfect example of how not to do a documentary. Student filmmakers take notes

-most of it's claims based of scientists and Darwin being religious are irrelevant considering what the film is about

-the film is dishonest and misleading in that it uses Hitler and the Holocaust to slander the people who believe in the theory of evolution

-the filmmakers use music by John Lennon and The Killers among others out of context and in a non justifiable way -the attempt to connect religious theory vs evolutionary theory with politics is not only inappropriate but also poorly conceived as well.

-there is no rhythm, strategy, or effort put into the research displayed here. Anybody with a computer, the internet, and a keypad can find out why the filmmakers are lying

-the film is, at the end of the day, propaganda, and anybody with any sense of actual human morality and sympathy are going to not like this film very much

Was the above comment useful to you?

171 out of 306 people found the following comment useful :-
A Global Conspiracy?, 25 April 2008
Author: egelman from Charlottesville, VA

For those who have found positive things to say about this film, I would ask you how the greatest conspiracy in human history might have been perpetrated. Virtually every major scientific society in the world has come out with the strongest support for evolution, a theory that has more factual underpinnings than the atomic theory of matter or quantum mechanics. The conspiracy to silence the dissent against evolution must include most people working in geology, biochemistry, paleontology, ecology, molecular genetics, etc., all fields where overwhelming amounts of evidence provide the basis for our understanding of how life on earth diverged from a common origin. When I am told that "leading" scientists have questioned evolution, it reminds me of the National Enquirer headline that stated that a space scientist had an encounter with aliens. Reading the article made it clear that this person was a draftsman at some NASA facility. Let us be clear that there is no scientific debate about whether evolution took place (that debate was finished more than 100 years ago), rather, it is religious fundamentalism that refuses to accept that humans evolved from other life forms (yet most Americans do not accept this fact). Ben Stein's agenda appears to be to drive America back to some fundamentalist time, while the rest of the world advances.

Was the above comment useful to you?

282 out of 533 people found the following comment useful :-
Better than I thought it would be - raises valid issues, 19 April 2008
8/10
Author: fx_man from USA

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The vitriol in many of the negative reviews and the dogged defense of the "mislead scientists" is more indicative of the reviewers own biases than what is actually presented in the film.

I was dragged to this one by friends, to be honest. I had read about the film even before it was released and how it was "creationist propaganda", and how P. Z. Myers was not allowed in to a screening but Dawkins got in, etc. So I already had a negative bias going in. However, by the end I have flipped around quite a bit.

Stein is more interested in dissecting whether there really is stonewalling in academia, and more importantly, whether important issues regarding science, philosophy and metaphysics are being conflated and misrepresented to the public.

ID as a "scientific theory" might not be meaningful or even valid, but it becomes clear from the film that the issues to which ID is directed are not necessarily the "how" of biological processes but the "why". Of course many will recognise that science is not meant to tackle "why", science concerns itself with the "how". So where's the problem, then? Well, that is precisely where the problem is, as it becomes clear from the film. Dawkins and many like him have set up a straw man, claiming an explanatory scope for one particular interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution far beyond its capacity to explain. In other words, they stretch science beyond the "how" to the "why", by hypothesising about life origins even though Darwin himself has not done so, save in some private letters, and Darwin's theory has never meant to encompass it. By doing this, Dawkins and many like him have created a false dichotomy, pitting science against religion, conflating science and metaphysics to the point of arguing metaphysics doesn't even have a place in the human quest for knowledge. Well, that is a strict philosophical position one can hold independent of empirical science. But it isn't any more valid than the metaphysical claims of ID.

The film wasn't deceptive or misrepresentative of any of the scientists, with the exception maybe of William Dembski, who was given a pass by Stein. Dembski has exhibited some of the same tendencies as Dawkins, on the opposite extreme. The documentary would have been stronger, had Stein asked Dembksi about some of Dembski's own statements regarding ID as the basis for a greater cultural movement, not really representing a scientific theory per se. Dembski is guilty of the same scope-stretching as Dawkins.

David Berlinski came across as the most incisive mind of the bunch, articulating issues for what they were. For example, he correctly pointed out how difficult it is to even talk about Darwinism since the concept of species itself is not well understood and continually redefined and refined. Reading the wikipedia entry on species and the species problem confirms this.

Finally, some have complained about the connection made between Darwin's theory and eugenics, and the connection to Hitler. For the record, connections have been made between Wagner's music and Hitler, and between Nietzsche's philosophy and Hitler. All this merely indicates that when arguing from the theory as a premise, one can easily end up devaluing human life. Thus, the main idea is that science cannot remain neutral in the sense that ideas it raises will have consequences. Berlinski, again, rightly points out that Darwinism was not a sufficient condition for the development of Hitler's "ultimate solution" and modern racism, but it was a necessary condition. If one thinks about it, it does provide a "scientific" basis for an already existing latent racism, giving it impetus and elevating it to what some consider justifiable actions.

The same connection has been made between religion and some horrible philosophies, and no one denies that the given dogmas of that religion might have been necessary for those philosophies.

So in the end, Expelled fulfills its mission in raising awareness of a very real problem today when it comes to discussing certain scientific and philosophical issues in academia and in the scientific establishment. I don't agree with the specifics of ID when it comes to biology, but as a general metaphysical world view, it has as much support in human history and evolution (yes, evolution) as atheism. And really, as it is clear from Dawkins' words, his real agenda is no less than to claim that atheism is the only intelligent choice. And apparently this should not be debated or arrived at by rational discourse,but by de-facto pronouncements and edicts, from Dawkins and those who think like him.

I don't think so. If anything, this film should encourage people to look into this for themselves and study what is at issue. In the marketplace of ideas truth eventually triumphs. History has taught us at least that. Why stonewall? I recommend this film to those with an open mind who enjoy a good debate now and then.

Was the above comment useful to you?

172 out of 315 people found the following comment useful :-
Are you Serious?, 22 April 2008
2/10
Author: metallicanomaly from United States

The only reason I give this 2 stars instead of one is that I do think Ben Stein and company did a fantastic job at making and spreading propaganda.

This movie is just that, propaganda, it has no true backing except by those who try to put spin on Creationism to make it more "politically correct" and to teach it with flimsy evidence, if you can even truly call it evidence.

One thing I found interesting is that while this is clearly a movie backing Intelligent Design, it offers us no evidence whatsoever supporting this claim. It just seeks to vilify the scientific community, making it out to be the great evil of our age. While it never says it outright, it sure does insinuate it. One of the examples that come to mind have to do with how they say that Darwinism was a crucial building block leading to Nazism (others I have seen tend to deny this fact, but I was quite shocked at the frankness of the comment when it appeared in the movie). Another is the claim that the scientific community suppresses knowledge and theories based of its own agenda. If a theory is rejected in the scientific community, it is not because there is a group trying to suppress knowledge, it is because the theory itself is inherently flawed, usually fatally so.

More and more throughout the movie I found myself dumbfounded at how easily people think they are being oppressed when there are no oppressors.

Would I recommend this movie to a friend? Yes, but only because I know that if they see it, they will probably have the same objections as me, and I think it is high time we finally got rid of this creationist propaganda once and for all.

Was the above comment useful to you?

97 out of 176 people found the following comment useful :-
Falsehoods and lies abound, 25 April 2008
1/10
Author: DMFIC from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

About the only thing I can say about this movie is it's pure unadulterated crap.

The movie claims itself to be a documentary about big science ignoring valid inquiry into scientific area while banishing dissenters from its ranks. All centering around the "controversy" over Evolution and Natural Selection vs. Intelligent Design (ID). In reality it is a massive piece of propaganda designed, presumably, to stir ID supporters into action.

Strangely, whilst this movie is supposed to be about Evolution vs. ID, neither term is ever actually defined. Though I suppose that their target audience would already know what these two things mean, for the purposes of the film it would probably be useful to take 60 seconds to define each.

To compound the matter, while the argument is for the incompleteness of scientific evidence toward evolution, all signs point to the makers of the film not even bothering to find out what incompleteness exists. For example, one of the film's producers recently gave an interview with Detroit weekly, during which he made absolutely false claims about what science doesn't know, on top of not understanding how science was done. When confronted by the interviewer that he was wrong and given scientific literature he was quick to point out that he wasn't a scientist. The implication being that he can't be held responsible to know even the basics of evolution before making a "documentary" about why it's wrong. This, I feel, exemplifies the glaring incompetence of the people behind the scenes.

Cases are also presented of people who were fired or dismissed from their positions for "questioning the validity of Darwinism(Evolution)". Investigation of these cases reveals their characterization of the events to be false.

Furthermore they imply that Natural Selection leads to atheism leads to Nazism leads to genocide/holocaust by using Lord Privy Seal jumps to stock footage of concentration camps. As if the hundreds of years of antisemitism including systematic killings predating even the birth of Darwin didn't happen.

Much imagery and context is also used to suggest that ID is the religious (read:Christian) view while only atheists believe in Evolution. There are many many God (whichever God you'd like) fearing individuals who think that evolution is our best explanation going, including prominent evolutionary biologist Ken Miller (See:Finding Darwin's God). When asked why they didn't include anyone like Ken Miller, one producer said they didn't want to confuse the issue. Interesting how these people who present themselves as such good and devout people are so skilled at deception and lies, something that I believe is a major sin under the big 10.

Save your time and your money, this film is worth neither the price of admission nor the time lost watching.

Was the above comment useful to you?

63 out of 113 people found the following comment useful :-
Willfully dishonest...., 29 April 2008
1/10
Author: (twotalbots) from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This "documentary" is so willfully dishonest as to be no more than a cheap propaganda piece.

For example, Mathis, Stein and company attempt to support the claim that any admission of the possibility of a divine creator is enough to get someone "expelled" from mainstream academia, and they pick four cases to try to illustrate their point.

Unfortunately, in all four cases, the people in question were _not_ persecuted for their views; in one case, the gentleman in question was reaching the end of his contract, knew it was coming, took the ethically questionable step of inserting a pro-ID paper into what he already knew to be his last issue of the journal he was working for /without farming it out for peer review/ first. His contract ended, as scheduled, and he moved on to other work, as scheduled, /for the same employer/.......and Stein tries to make it sound like he was dismissed from his position and having difficulty finding work in order to support his "ID is persecuted" claim.

In another case, the gentleman was denied tenure. Stein claims it was for his pro-ID views, when in reality he was turned down for failures to procure grants and having every single one of the graduate students he advised fail to complete their course of study -- in short, he was denied tenure for poor job performance, along with several others at the same university that came up for review at the same time.

Every single one of the examples cited by Stein in the movie is similarly falsely represented.

The movie further tries to enhance the illusion of entrenched atheism in the scientific community by scrupulously avoiding interviewing the many prominent evolutionists who also happen to be deeply religious, like Dr. Kenneth Miller, who testified to devastating effect against ID in the Dover, PA, trial, is author of the most widely sold series of biology textbooks in the US.....and who opened his talk about Dover at Case-Western University with prayer, making it abundantly clear that he is also a religiously devout man (as many in the sciences are). When asked why such prominent individuals were ignored, Mathis, the producer of the film, stated that he didn't want to confuse the audience.

In the most nauseating, distasteful portion of the movie, Stein attempts to link Darwinian evolution with the Holocaust, implying strongly that it was Darwin that inspired the Nazis to practice racial "purification", killing millions in the process; Stein even selectively quotes Darwin's writings to create the illusion of such support, neglecting to mention that the very next sentence after the quoted text was a condemnation of the thought that selective breeding should be used on humans.

Darwin's position on the matter aside, the notion of eugenics predates Darwin by millennia, as anyone who has practiced animal husbandry should be aware -- using selective breeding, we've turned wolves to dogs, amaranth to corn, plantains to bananas, ad infinitum. Selective breeding is older than the art of writing....and has been applied to humans in various societies in the past as well. Who hasn't heard of the ancient Spartan habit of leaving their weak and deformed children in the wilds to die? Add to the case that Hitler's writings /never mention Darwin or evolution by natural selection/, while being rife with the anti-semitic writings of Luther and sundry religious leaders, that the Holocaust was not the first pogrom against the Jewish people in Europe (merely the largest scale, most vicious and brutal), and that all prior pogroms were launched /for religious reasons/, and quite the opposite case appears to be true -- that the mass slaughter of the Holocaust was just a continuation of religiously-based anti-semitism that had, at the time, been entrenched in Europe for centuries. Atheism and Darwinian evolution had _nothing_ to do with it.

To try to twist this crime against humanity for political gain like Stein has in this film sickens me.

This film is, in short, a hate-filled propaganda piece, as devoid of honesty as it is of humanity, and it deserves the lowest rating I can possibly give it.

Was the above comment useful to you?

90 out of 168 people found the following comment useful :-
Useless Propaganda., 25 April 2008
1/10
Author: Jenn Gauthier from Alexandria, MN

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This movie plays like a cheesy infomercial, using propaganda, false claims, hype, and vilification of the opposition to sell a substandard product. The ID proponents know their claims are wrong, so they have to rely on something other than the facts to sell their ideas. I'm sure the buses full of little church-going, home schooled, rationalism-hating fundamentalists will adore the movie, but for the rest of us who have actually taken a science class at some point in our lives, this piece of garbage should make us feel both sick and very, very concerned about the future of our educational institutions.

As for the specifics of the movie itself, it shouldn't even have been released, considering that they seem to have stolen material from everyone on the planet, including Harvard and Yoko Ono. Also, their attempts to make Richard Dawkins look like the antichrist and to make Ben Stein appear funny fall pathetically flat. Seeing this movie is a waste of time no matter what you believe.

Was the above comment useful to you?

72 out of 137 people found the following comment useful :-
A procession of Holy Strawmen, 23 April 2008
1/10
Author: wlwysxsbmskj from Sudan

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

If you can't argue for your position on intellectual grounds, try politics. If you can't succeed with legitimate political argument, resort to ad hominem attacks. That's what the Intelligent Design (ID) movement has been reduced to, especially in Expelled. ID creationists have produced no credible argument against the theory of evolution.

Politically their fortunes have been devastated ever since the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania court decision in which a George W. Bush-appointed Church-going judge found ID to be religious dogma that cannot legally be introduced in public school science classes. So now we are presented with a new line of attack: because natural selection was invoked by the Nazis in support of genocide (itself a dubious claim), the theory of evolution must be false.

What a towering heap of horse droppings this movie was. Urgh!

Was the above comment useful to you?

32 out of 58 people found the following comment useful :-
Thought provoking, 3 May 2008
8/10
Author: note-card from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed will make you angry, indignant, or stolid. Though I believe there have been some license taken for the sake of narrative thread, I can say first-hand that what Ben Stein espoused in this film is very true.

The basic premise of this film is the fact that there are people in America who are the self-declared arbiters of what is scientific thought and what isn't. They insist that the arguments for the establishment of life as being one of complete accidental and naturalistic processes is over, and all those that do not believe this is a religious kook that must be silenced lest they bring Creationist thought into the classroom.

If you listen to what is being said, instead of reading into it what you want, it points out the fanatic zeal and processes of which the Darwinists wish to purge any notions of Intelligent Design research into obscurity by firing and dismissing those that pose a challenge to that orthodoxy.

The very beginning of this film has Mr. Stein talking about the premise of the whole film, which is about Freedom of Inquiry - the right to pursue any line of research wherever the evidence leads without fear of reprisals.

The criticisms of those who believe it is unfair that Stein linked Darwinism to the philosophy of the Nazis (and others, such as Planned Parenthood) aren't being very astute. David Berlinski, interviewed in the film, clearly says that though not all Darwinists agree or became Nazis or were into Eugenics, Darwinism was a necessary ingredient in the development of these philosophies. This is absolutely true. Only now, in our perspective where we see the Nazis as truly abhorrent as they were, do we find such criticism; the curator of the museum at Hadamar, also shown in the film, clearly states that the beliefs behind the atrocities committed there had their roots in the 1920s before the rise of National Socialism.

Judge for yourself.

Was the above comment useful to you?
Page 1 of 26:[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [Next]

Add another comment

Related Links

Plot synopsis Ratings External reviews
Parents Guide Official site Plot keywords
Main details Your user comments Your vote history