Dembski: ‘Expelled’ Exposes Hypocrisy

“O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called ‘knowledge’” I Tim 6:20

A controversial documentary released nationwide April 18th could foster a cultural shift “equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall,” says William Dembski, research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The seminary hosted a private screening of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” (PG) in early March. In the film, host Ben Stein tracks down scholars who have been “expelled” by the academic community for their support of intelligent design (ID), a research program that flies in the face of Darwinism. Dembski is featured in the documentary.

“The film exposes the hypocrisy of an academic and cultural elite who pretend that they value freedom of inquiry and expression, but in fact suppress it when it classes with their deeply held materialistic convictions,” Dembski said. He and other proponents of ID have suggested that the universe shows signs of having been designed by and intelligent being.

"Many fields of study within modern science involve intelligent design, including archeology, forensics, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)," Dembski said. An archeologist, for example, examines the evidence - such as a curiously shaped stone - to determine whether it might be the product of a human intelligence.

“These sciences, however, are uncontroversial because any intelligence detected though them could be an ‘evolved’ intelligence,” Dembski said. “Most of the action with ID, on the other hand, centers in biology, so than any intelligence involved with the emergence of living things is likely to be an ‘un-evolved’ intelligence. ID, therefore, challenges materialistic theories of evolution, such as Darwinism.”

Unlike biblical creationism, ID does not begin with the Genesis account of creation, nor do its proponents attempt to describe the nature of the intelligence that designed the universe. Despite this fact, Dembski noted, “ID is friendly to Christian theism in a way that materialistic forms of evolution never have been.”

“One of the biggest obstacles to people coming to Christ in Western culture is the impression that science has disproved the Bible and Christianity,” he said. “ID, therefore, helps to correct this false impression by showing that our best science supports belief in a higher intelligence responsible fore life. ID does not give you the Christian God as such, but it puts you in the right ballpark.”

Dembski told the Southern Baptist TEXAN that those who most need to see the movie are “parents of children in high school or college, as well as those children themselves, who may think that the biological sciences are a dispassionate search for truth about life - but many of whose practitioners see biology, especially evolutionary biology, as an ideological weapon to destroy faith in God.”