Before getting into the meat of
presenting the evidence against the movie, I spend a little time discussing what
type of evidence I collected (a lot of web links), and my thoughts on the
natural human tendency to just toss out any sources which go against what we
already believe.
In
this section, I provide strong evidence that the evolutionists[1]
who were interviewed in the movie were intentionally deceived about what the
nature of the movie would be. If the people making the movie deliberately
deceived these interviewees, who else might they have deliberately deceived
(i.e., the audience)?
In
this section, I fact-check the claims made by the people the movie says were
“expelled” (persecuted or punished for advocating intelligent design) and show
that most of their major claims of persecution are directly contradicted by
verifiable facts of what really happened (and the ones that aren’t provably
false are either highly questionable, or just non-stories).
In
this section, I expand on and show evidence for two major ways that the movie
betrays a clear double standard and shows bias for their side (just like the
movie claims the evolutionists do). It ignores and denies the existence of
those many Christians who believe in evolution and yet remain religious, and it
fails to includes similar “expelled” stories of people who suffered persecution
for teaching evolution instead of Biblical creationism.
Section
4: Connecting Darwin to Hitler
Though it only takes up about ten
minutes of the film, the allegation of a direct causal relationship between
Darwin’s theory of evolution and Hitler committing the Holocaust is such a
grandiose and serious claim that I had to devote a disproportionate amount of
space to unpacking all the problems with this argument. To that end, I
separated this section into multiple subsections…
I begin by giving an overview of
the ways that invoking Hitler to make your point is generally considered a very
cheap and even fallacious rhetorical tactic, regardless of how accurate the
connection to Hitler may be (but don’t worry, I cover the inaccuracy of the
Hitler connection further on).
Since the primary source for this
section of the movie is the book From
Darwin to Hitler by Richard Weikart, I provide some excerpts from scholarly
reviews of the book, to show that it’s not exactly revered as a paragon of
excellence within the academic community, lest you think that Weikart’s word on
the issue should be accepted simply because he’s a historian and I’m not.
I address the argument of this part of the
movie more directly, showing quotes from Hitler himself and other sources to
demonstrate that it doesn’t make logical or historical sense to claim that
Darwin influenced Hitler to commit the Holocaust.
I provide a fuller (and less
deceptive) context for the quote from Darwin’s book that Ben Stein recited in
the part of the movie trying to connect Darwin to Hitler.
I present alternate sources which
claim that Hitler was far more influenced by religious influences than by
Darwin, and present a large collection of quotes from Mein Kampf which indicate a religious viewpoint.
I shine a light on the deceptive
way that people in this movie cover their butts by quietly acknowledging how
belief in Darwinian evolution couldn’t really have been the reason for the
Holocaust all by itself, even as they turn around and try to act like it was.
I examine the moral bankruptcy of trying to convince people that a scientific theory is wrong
by leveraging the deaths of millions to turn people against the perceived
consequences of a theory, instead of the scientific accuracy of it.
In
this section, I go through all the rest of the movie not covered in the major sections,
and makes notes about smaller individual points; some are based on evidence,
some are more personal subjective commentaries. But with the overall trend of
bad information that’s been established by the previous four sections, I think
it’s fair to look with a little closer scrutiny at less dramatically deceptive
elements of the movie. I believe the pattern of false information and
manipulation which has thus far been established is consistently upheld
throughout the movie.
[1] Having
been a creationist for the first 26 years of my life, I never gave a second
thought to the term “evolutionist.”
However, since first writing this, it’s come to my attention that the
term is considered pejorative by many people on the evolution side, because creationists
often use it in connection with the idea that people on the evolution side are
just following “the religion of evolutionism” (which is absolutely not a real
thing, by the way). I don’t think it
necessarily needs to be taken that way; yes, terns like “theist” and “atheist”
do indicate religious beliefs (or lack thereof), but terms like “biologist” and
“archaeologist” do not. So, there really
shouldn’t be anything about the “-ist” suffix which denotes religion. Furthermore, Richard Dawkins has even
ascribed the label to himself on at least one occasion,
so I don’t think there’s any reason to think it must always be taken
pejoratively.
In any case, I’m not gonna go back and change it now, because I think a whole phrase like “people on the evolution side” might get to be too cumbersome, and because this footnote is formally serving as my notice that I don’t mean it in the pejorative sense that some people take it.
In any case, I’m not gonna go back and change it now, because I think a whole phrase like “people on the evolution side” might get to be too cumbersome, and because this footnote is formally serving as my notice that I don’t mean it in the pejorative sense that some people take it.
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