God is.

My twin found this for me. Amazing new movie coming out.

I've always had a lot of respect for Ben Stein. I enjoy people that are both intelligent and humorous. Seems like a nice guy, too - I wrote him once about a fight I got into when Nixon was accused of Watergate. I was in the 6th grade, and some liberal kid wouldn't shut up, so I kicked his ass. Ben was one of Nixon's speechwriters. I actually wrote him just to say I appreciated his work and the story came with it. He wrote back! Nice guy.

He has a movie coming out in April 2008, called "Expelled." Watch the trailer here. He investigated and now reports on the professional difficulties of people in academia and the sciences that look at Intelligent Design as a scientific theory. Seems their careers are being destroyed. I never understood why. Well, not unless you look beyond Darwin's theory and assume a more sinister agenda: the denial of God. Do you think?

No need to dwell on it, but have you noticed that being politically correct means that you have to agree with the liberals? If you disagree, then speech is no longer free. Everybody has to be happy and treated with respect - unless you disagree. Then you get pummeled.

That's the issue in Expelled. If you disagree with some guy that drew birds over a hundred years ago and knew nothing of DNA - who thought that a cell was filled with this protoplasm icky stuff which itself was the lowest form of detail in life - then you are committing ... wait for it ... heresy! How ironic, eh?

I read a well-reasoned refutation of Darwin in Biochemist Micheal Behe's Darwin's Black Box. (I'm not going to honor it with a link - but if you google the book title, you get a whole lot of nasty scientists trying refute the book. If only they would spend that energy on Algore.)

Darwin said that if a system in nature is irreducibly complex, then Evolution as a theory does not work. That is, since the theory is one of incremental change forward and we are presently viewing evolved systems, we must be able to work those systems backward to their original state. If an evolved system cannot be reduced because the removal of one part would make the entire system not work, then that system is irreducibly complex. Behe started with the example of a mousetrap. Remove any one part and it won't catch mice (which seems to be its purpose for existing). Work it forward and the same conundrum arises - a metal bar can't be held back without a piece of wood which itself doesn't need a hook. There are evolved pieces in a mousetrap that had to be designed.

Behe uses several examples from the human body. I love the blood coagulation example. The proteins involved in coagulating blood are remarkable. And think about it - if blood flowed to provide oxygen but never coagulated in the earliest life forms, every member in a species would have bled out and died before being able to evolve. Then when coagulation did begin, why didn't the entire body gum up and the host die? But dig into the biochemical reactions at the site of an injury and learn how coagulation begins and ends, and it becomes clear that there is no reasonable manner except scientific bullshit ("there is so much unused stuff in the system that it just ... it just ... um, it just happened because all the precursors were there!") to refute it.

But, ah, therein lies the issue. Instead of giving Intelligent Design it's fair run (which they would do if, say, we ignored solar activity and its effects on the icecaps of Mars, and instead blame us for Global Warming), they put up impossible obstacles - Intelligent Design? That's a GOD. That's RELIGION. Then they break out the stakes and kindling.

So now Ben has joined the argument. Can't wait to see the film. Will it get as much play as Algore's piece of unscientific garbage on melting icebergs?

Here's the Blog that Ben is keeping. Here's a few-page Press Kit.

Should be fun.

And now a self promotion. I wrote a piece some time ago - October 2005 - Evolution and Intelligent Design - and reproduced here:

Evolution theory works something like this: there was, you see, this big BANG!, then like, WHOMPF! all this stuff was just screaming outward at incredible rates of speed and then somehow or another some of it started spinning really, really fast (instead of continuing outward as a result of the original propulsion, some of it started to circle back!) and that spinning stuff caught on fire, well, nuclear fusion kinda sorta that starts at the core of this spinning thing where the pressure is so great that hydrogen is like smashed into helium-4 (the loss of mass creates energy – ever hear of the theory of relativity, duh?!?) and then the energy becomes a photon and starts moving outward and does this photon-gas-photon-gas thingey to like 10 to the 25th times and finally it reaches the surface (like 100,000 to 200,000 years after the hydrogen pressure thingey) and then there’s this convection of hot and cooler gas – anyway, light and heat is spit outward and while all this is happening other stuff started to spin around those firey things and on one of them a cell emerged – quite by random chance, mind you, well maybe the saline solution helped but that just kinda appeared, too – and that cell split into two pieces and then, and then it evolved (!) to optimize its in situ experience and then, and then eventually it evolved into us (and monkeys, too!): each cell in our body contains a copy of our DNA; each dual strand of DNA in each of our cells is made up of 3,000,000,000 (three billion) molecules; each human body contains 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) cells. One hundred trillion multiplied by three billion (btw, 300 sextillion; unless you are in Europe where it is called 300 trilliard because what the Brits call a sextillion we call an undecillion; confusing, I know – let’s be clear, we’re talking 10 to the 21st, not 10 to the 36th; if it were a hard disk, it would be 300 zettabytes – ok, I’ll stop) and with all that evoluting goin’ on there is only one form of humanoid on our planet – go figure – what a glorious random chance event we are!!!

oh, btw, that stuff preceding the BANG!, the stuff in the first instance, was sumptin' outta nuttin'.

And you people think I'm the one going on faith?