Must See Outrageous Film: Expelled

If a free society in which all truth-claims, whether scientific, theological, moral or political, are open for discussion and testing, then you must see Expelled when it opens on Friday, April 18. In this film, Ben Stein explores the fear and hatred within the university establishment directed against highly accomplished scientists whose only offense is that they see evidence of an intelligent architect behind the beauty and order of the universe. Watch the trailer.

Be sure to see it this Friday on opening weekend. The box office response will embolden producers to back a string of films waiting in the wings that deal with moral, religious and philosophical themes that the liberal elite considers beyond the pale of reasonable discussion.

I saw the film at a advanced screening for the King's College community and some others in New York. I must say that my expectations were not high going into it. But it was not long before I was riveted. The connection the film draws between the evolutionary view of the world and the architects of the holocaust is intellectually compelling and deeply moving. If you recognize that the civility of Western civilization is founded upon and fortified by what are for many people assumptions about our shared human nature and about the nature of the world we inhabit, then after viewing this film you will see that the evolutionary view of the world is like battery acid to those foundations and supports.

The film introduces a Berlin Wall theme from the very start. When a regime's theoretical justification becomes widely and publicly questioned, it's leadership begins to panic and becomes repressive. The premise of Expelled is that we are seeing this in academia, the network of colleges and universities that are training tomorrow's leaders. The evolutionary establishment gets in a big panic over the least suggestion that a teacher or scientist might entertain the notion of an intelligent designer behind the universe (which is not conceding much, by the way) because, like the speech stifling communists of the 1980s, their untenable theories are crumbling. Expelled hopes to give wider freedom for honest and able scientists to question those theories, come what may.