Expelled, part IV

I will now discuss the last part of the movie. In this, Stein claims that "Darwinism" lead to the holocaust. I don't even know if I need to refute this. It is well known that the ultimate cliche cheap shot argument is to compare your opponent to Hitler or the holocaust. Doing so is almost admitting you lost and don't have any real content. The movie does not attempt to make an argument of cause and effect or look at the statements of the people who carried out the holocaust to see if they were influenced by Darwin. For the most part, they simply show the camps where it was carried out and show the holocaust was bad. Thanks, we already knew that.

What is the evidence? One quote from Hitler about inferior races and someone saying that the euthanasia programm was influenced by eugenics and social Darwinism. That's it. We could easily get a quote of Hitler referring to God being against the Jews and follow it with 10 minutes of footage from Dachau and claim to have made a case.

Eugenics was influenced at least as much by genetics as evolution. Eugenics became common only after the discovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900, 35 years after Origin of Species. It is based on principles of artificial selection that predate Darwin--needless to say, killing people with cyanide is not natural selection. Should we say that genetics lead to the holocaust? The point is that any idea can be distorted to serve a purpose. Hitler used appeals to religion in his hate against the Jews much more than appeals to evolution. Evolution was never mentioned in Mein Kampf, but creation was nearly two dozen times. Does that mean religion leads to the holocaust? No, it means that people will find whatever tools are available to justify their hate.

Obviously, the most important contribution to the holocaust is antisemitism, which existed for a millennium before Darwin and was mostly religiously based. It was only in Germany, with its long history of antisemitism, that evolution was applied against the Jews. In America, with a history of unbridled capitalism, it was used to justify unbridled capitalism and the robber barons. Evolution had the strongest hold in England, but England has no blemish such as the holocaust. If there is a cause and effect, shouldn't we see a correlation between belief in evolution and eugenics movements? We see no such thing.

Does the existence of the atom bomb prove the atom is false? True ideas can have bad consequences. In this case, there is no evidence even for that. The movie also quotes Darwin out of context to make it sound like he is in favor of the extermination of races, when if they had read one further sentence, we find that Darwin meant the opposite. But that is irrelevant. Who cares what Darwin thought? Darwin was compassionate and ahead of his time on these issues, but if he had been a bigoted sexist sheep lover it would have no relevance on the truth of his ideas or even on whether his ideas were abused by others.

This part of the movie is by far the most revolting and cheap. Although maybe the true believers would be influenced by this, I suspect even many of them would feel it has gone too far, and no one with a slightly open mind would possibly be swayed by the cheap shot.

The movie ends with a big confrontation with the devil, or Richard Dawkins, it isn't clear if they make a distinction. I've already discussed how they deal with him, but there is one more irony. At one point, they ask him to speculate about the possibility of design. He basically says that OK, if I grant you that just maybe there is some possible way we could find design, maybe by an alien, that still doesn't solve the problem because we would have to ask how that designer arose, which he argues is still natural selection. It was pure speculation and not an endorsement, but Stein interprets this as showing Dawkins would consider the possibility of intelligent design. Somehow the irony of that is lost. The first half of the movie was all about how Darwinists won't even consider design, and now Stein is trumping the fact that Dawkins would consider design as if that is a point for them? He just disproved the entire first half of the movie. The stupidity burns.