A crowd of 350 invited guests attended a pre-screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed tonight in Seattle's Pacific Place. I can see now why the eminent Richard Dawkins, who crashed a screening in Minneapolis last week, remains so upset about Ben Stein's movie. He must not have realized until he sat in the theater last week and heard people laughing at him on the screen that he had made himself look foolish. On his website he calls the audience "sycophantic."
Among other things, he writes that before he was interviewed he didn't know who actor/economist/columnist Ben Stein was or that his droll monotone had comedic appeal to those strange Americans. He's so "boring," Dawkins writes. (Ferris Bueller thought the very same, Richard.)
Of Stein's laconic inquiry as to whether he saw any way intelligent design could occur in the universe, Dawkins complains that "I was charitable enough to think he (Stein) was an honestly stupid man seeking enlightenment from a scientist."
How typically "charitable" of Dawkins that he had such a generous thought. And then to have his charity betrayed when the cheeky Yankee actually used Dawkins' extensive reply in the film!
In Seattle, the sycophantic audience chuckled, then guffawed as Stein slowly winkled out of Dawkins the answer that intelligent space aliens might have "seeded" the Earth with its first life molecule. (Actually, does anyone wonder why those "highly evolved" aliens would stop with creating a mere molecule? After coming so far, why not linger and go all the way, create, oh, I don't know, fishes and amphibians and human beings while they were at it?)
So now he deplores the film's "cheap laughs at expense of scientists who are making honest attempts to explain difficult points." He means himself. He's a victim, see. So is his buddy, P. Z. Myers, who started attacking the film weeks ago on his blog, and was not let into the Minneapolis shindig.
Yet in his blog Dawkins complains that Expelled's tale of persecuted scientists seems "whiny" to him.
I suspect that Dawkins may have been upset, furthermore, to see captured on film the hard swipe he takes at Eugenie Scott and the accommodationist strategy of the National Center for Science Education. It is a telling moment, and give credit to Dawkins for his candor about the atheism baked into Darwinism and the deceitful nature of the NCSE's claims of compatibility between Darwinism and religion. He does a commendable job of pulling the veil aside.
Less candor is apparent as Dawkins returns to his charge (made in The New York Times) that the film unfairly shows Darwinism's influence on Nazi race policies. "The alleged association of Darwinism with Nazism is harped on for what seemed like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage," he scolds. Having seen that statement before last night's screening, I tried as best I could in the dark to clock the time in the film devoted to the Nazis. It was roughly 10 minutes. That included Ben Stein's chilling interview with the head of the museum at the former sanatorium at Hadamar, near Dachau, where the director readily acknowledged--even insisted on--the Darwinian provenance of the Nazi treatment of the handicapped "patients" there. And it included clips from Nazi propaganda films that eerily advocate the line of "natural selection" in human beings. How can you argue with that? The film is careful to qualify the case of Darwinism's influence on Nazi policies. But evidence of influence is abundant. (Much more could have been used if the film really had spent "hours" on the subject.)
As I have noted before, the Expelled producers are nervous about what they see as potential efforts by screening interlopers to record the film and expose it in ways that would damage its commercial value. In Seattle, even some of the "sycophants" were chuckling as a boilerplate copyright protection warning was read aloud. But I don't think any in the audience would have characterized the person who read it the way Dawkins characterizes the one who read it in Minneapolis--as a "Gauleiter."
A "Gauleiter"? A Nazi district leader?
Funny word choice for a man who is unhappy that Expelled raises the question of Darwinian theory's influence on the Nazis.
Dawkins on his website is at pains to protest that he himself does not promote a Darwinian society. Good for him. But he might be more persuasive if he were willing to concede that a Darwinian society not only would have the potential to become a fascist state--which he does--but also that once in history Darwinist views contributed to creating just such a state.
After last night's screening, a good part of the crowd in Seattle stayed around as long as the theater management would allow to talk with three of the Darwin critics and ID scientists who were interviewed in the movie. I wish Richard Dawkins had snuck into that event so they could have invited him to join them.