Expelled: “Reason!” and “Evidence!” Report to the Principal’s Office

In response to a friend’s Facebook posting of the film trailer, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, I composed what is about to follow, with a few amendments and afterthoughts. Additionally, this post contains several quotations--some rather lengthy, yet all good reads.

Here is my reply:

Debate in science is fine; it is, in fact, encouraged. For without it, there ceases growth and maturity of the scientific disciplines. Organizations, like the Discovery Institute, exist and their work is judged by the scientific community for what it is and what it is not.

In economics, a similar argument occurs by the Marxists, as in the Intelligent Design camp, alleging that the Capitalists, as do Evolutionists, judge their ideas out of the debate. The facts explicitly and continuously demonstrate that collectivism and Intelligent Design cannot withstand the over-whelming evidence in support of free market enterprise and biological evolution. One hardly passes hours awaiting the diminuendo of these two. (See 1a & 1c quotations.)

The supernatural cannot be measured or studied in a scientific manner, and ergo, to say it can, negates the supernatural label itself, bringing phenomenon into the natural realm. In so doing, science explores its new jurisdiction, as it does all that which falls into natural heavens. (See 3a quotation.)

Difficult, life is not. All the four elements for life are found in nature: Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Science is about harmony, where the supernatural--including, therefore, religion--is dysfunction and deconstruction of said harmoniousness. (See 1c, 1d, & 2a quotations.)

Science is not stepping on supernatural toes; it is the supenaturalists that attempt to force the natural sciences into the corner by decrying reason and evidence. (See 1b, 2a, & 3a quotations.)

Evolution explains all life on this plant in a very graceful and poetic manner. Also, to say that evolution is life by mere chance insults the biological sciences and the evidence that supports the theory of evolution, or in layman, the fact of evolution. (See 3b & 3c quotations.)

The thing about science is that it has to agree with itself. The theory of gravity cannot only work under certain conditions; that is, it must work at all times, in all places. The theory of germs and countless more theories must be multi-communital for them to hold true.

As a student of economic science, I discovered early that Capitalism and Evolution share the same basis: natural selection. Businesses and individuals succeed and thrive do to their abilities to adapt to the economic climate in which they find their given state of affairs, and the same holds for living species on a biological level.

In saying this, I draw the strengthen of reason between the two;--that is, the evolutionary survival behaviors we possess, may not be the must divine in manner, yet to put it succinctly, the socio-economic system cannot rest its endurance on the noblest motive, yet must utilize the strongest motive in the most efficient ways manageable. (See 5a quotation.)

The motive, above here mentioned, is simply personal self-interest, on a conscious or a cellular level. For without self-interest, as an individual's sole purpose, we all pass into extinction and the dusty unfriendly pages of history. (See 4a, 4b, & 5b quotations.)


Quotations 1’s, by John Stuart Mills, Economist and Philosopher
Quotations 2’s, by Sam Harris, Neuroscientist and Philosopher
Quotations 3’s, by Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist
Quotations 4’s, by Adam Smith, Economist and Philosopher
Quotations 5’s, by John Maynard Keynes, Economist


1a: “Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”

1b: “Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.”

1c: “It is accordingly on this battlefield [that is, religious belief], almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly controverted. The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. In the minds of almost all religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves. One person will bear with dissent in matters of church government, but not of dogma; another can tolerate everybody, short of a Papist or an Unitarian; another, every one who believes in revealed religion; a few extend their charity a little further, but stop at the belief in a God and in a future state. Wherever the sentiment of the majority is still genuine and intense, it is found to have abated little of its claim to be obeyed. ”

1d: “On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.”

2a: The “problem with arguing for the truth of religion is that the evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent. And this subsumes all claims about the existence of a personal God, the divine origin of certain books, the virgin birth of certain people, the veracity of ancient miracles, all of it.

“Consider Christianity, the entire doctrine is predicated on the idea that the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. This is why people believe Jesus was a son of God, divine, etc. This textual claim--this textual claim is problematic because everyone acknowledges that the Gospels follow Jesus' ministry by decades and there is no extra biblical account of his miracles. But the truth is quite a bit worse than that.

“The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus it still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred. Why not? Well, the problem is that first-hand reports of miracles are quite common even in the 21st-century.

“I have met literally hundreds at this point of Western educated men and women who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus. I, actually, remain open to evidence of such powers. The fact is that people who tell these stories desperately want to believe them. All to my knowledge lack the kind of corroborating evidence we should require before believing that nature's laws have been abrogated in this way. And people who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non-miraculous causes.

“But it remains a fact that yogis and mystics are said to be walking on water and raising the dead and flying without the aid of technology; materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future. Right now, in fact all of these powers have been ascribed to Satya Sai Baba, the South Indian guru by an uncountable number of eyewitnesses. He even claims to have been born of a virgin, which is not all that uncommon a claim in the history of religion or in history generally. Genghis Khan, supposedly, was born of a virgin, as was Alexander. Apparently parthenogenesis doesn't guarantee that you're going to turn the other cheek....

“...You can even watch his miracles on YouTube; prepare to be under-whelmed. Maybe it's true that he has an Afro of sufficient diameter as to suggest a total detachment from the opinions of his fellow human beings. But I'm not sure this is reason enough to worship him; in any case.

“So, consider as though for the first time the foundational claim of Christianity. The claim is this that miracle stories of a sort that today surround a person like Satya Sai Baba become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence. We have Satya Sai Baba's miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eyewitnesses. And they don't even a merit an hour on the Discovery Channel. But you place a few miracle stories in some ancient books and half the people on this earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around them. Does anyone else see a problem with that?”

3a: “Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle--and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it--an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.”

3b: “In 1859, Charles Darwin announced one of the greatest ideas ever to occur to a human mind: cumulative evolution by natural selection. Living complexity is indeed orders of magnitude too improbable to have come about by chance. But only if we assume that all the luck has to come in one fell swoop. When cascades of small chance steps accumulate, you can reach prodigious heights of adaptive complexity. That cumulative build-up is evolution. Its guiding force is natural selection...

“Natural selection is quintessentially non-random, yet it is lamentably often miscalled random. This one mistake underlies much of the skeptical backlash against evolution. Chance cannot explain life. Design is as bad an explanation as chance because it raises bigger questions than it answers. Evolution by natural selection is the only workable theory ever proposed that is capable of explaining life, and it does so brilliantly.”

3c: “Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic 'crane' (to use Daniel Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain--a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it....

“Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species--plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is--to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is natural selection.

“We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very, very improbable.”

4a: “It is not not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

4b: “He... neither intends to promoting it... he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote and which was no part of his intention.”

5a: “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

5b: “In the long run, we are all dead.”


I understand that some of the quotations might not have aligned themselves strictly with the paragraph in my reply, yet I find the essences there, nonetheless. The only fitting way to draw this lengthy post to a close to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, journalist and author: what in any holy scripture could not have been written that by man at the period in history in which it was penned?