No Intelligence Required

Good movie alert for your Netflix queue: Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” The movie is serious and yet lighthearted, entertaining and informational, funny and significant. Stein himself is quite a trip: brilliant lawyer, economist, Yale valedictorian and journalist; both pro-life and pro-animal (not that most pro-lifers are anti-animal, we are just not particularly pro-animal, except for the Franciscan Felicians I work with); a celebrity actor and a Republican speech writer; owner of multiple-cats-and-dogs and adoptive father; and Ferris Beuller’s boring high school teacher! If you have time to kill, do a Google and read some of his writings and interviews. They are precious!

In the movie, he interviews top-shelf scientists who have serious intellectual problems with Darwinian evolution as a comprehensive explanation for the “origin of species.” It is clear that Intelligent Design has roots in legitimate scientific thought and research and is not merely fundamentalist creationism in a more sophisticated outfit. He interviews a string of outstanding scientists who were immediately blackballed for mentioning the
I-word and the D-word sequentially or hinting the slightest doubt about the infallible dogma of evolution. As a Jew, he taps into his own heritage and shows the roots of eugenics and Nazi genocide in Social Darwinism.

Clearly, there is a strong community of scientific dissent against Darwinism as a comprehensive scientific theory. There are holes and gaps in the theory; but apparently the establishment does not tolerate such disagreement.

Mainstream evolutionists have a valid point that Intelligent Design is itself not a scientific concept in that it is not verifiable or measurable. It does not operate within the realms of efficient and material causality that the natural sciences have adopted as their parameters. The concept is not really theological either because, unlike Creationism, it does not come from revelation. Rather, it is a philosophical concept and belongs in the curriculum under something like Philosophy of Science. This area is an important one today because science is increasingly determining how the broader culture understands reality. Catholic education on the secondary and college level is the ideal place to treat these important topics. I can’t imagine that public schooling is equipped to address them with any depth and nuance (so I am not boycotting the teaching of evolution in public schools!)

The broader cultural problem, beyond science class, is that evolution in widely accepted as a meta-narrative or Grand Theory that can explain all of life. Popular literature, news articles and magazines are filled with bio-babble: men are promiscuous because they want to enhance chances of their genes surviving; men play golf because hunting patterns of shoot and pursue were functional for survival in the jungle; and so forth.

In a post-modern academy that boasts of deconstructing every arrogant meta-theory, evolution flourishes as the unacknowledged grand paradigm that is credulously accepted even as it prides itself on thoroughgoing skepticism and criticism. Stein masterfully demonstrates that in such circles, intelligence is neither required nor allowed.