Being someone that doesn’t think much of the whole idea of Intelligent Design, it was a fit and a struggle to walk into Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed with an open mind. But when the film rolls with and begins with using footage of the construction of the Berlin Wall as some kind of metaphor for the divide between science and faith, I could practically hear eyes rolling. Then as host/narrator Ben Stein walks out on stage at the auditorium at Pepperdine University, I thought, “Oh jeez, is this supposed to be Stein’s own Inconvenient Truth?”

But if you’re looking for a film to offer you something resembling a cogent debate on the merits of Intelligent Design as a potential alternative to Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Origin of the Species, you’re not going to find it here. Worse still is the fact that Stein, the filmmakers and the producers try to frame their arguments around the notion that this isn’t about ID per se, but rather the scientific community’s unwillingness to vet new theories and listen to challenges over excepted knowledge. By and large, this portion of the movie is its most successful portion, but as I was watching the movie, that’s not the point or intent that was coming through.

Mostly though, Expelled seems to be a vitriolic tirade against “big science,” which I swear is something I once heard come out of Homer Simpson’s mouth. This idea that American scientists and intelligensia are purposefully and maliciously launching a campaign to silence those that dare open themselves up to the mere possibility of ID and bring that into the classroom. SO it’s kind of like oil companies trying to stifle the development of green technologies, or when the mob triess to keep rival gangs from moving in on their racket. With every interview, Stein tests evolutionary biologists that balk at ID to tell him why Darwin’s evolution trumps the notion of intelligent design, but if I’d never heard of it before, after watching Expelled, I’d still have no idea what ID is.

Perhaps most offensive, aside from the assertions that America’s scientists are some kind of illuminati trying to propagate some kind of godless agenda on the country, is the film’s use of the slippery slope principle. Basically, Darwinian proponents want us to become less religious and more atheistic. Do you know who else was an atheist? Stalin. That’s persuasive enough, right? But then again, Darwinism is also at fault for its red-haired cousin, Social Darwinism, which was a school of thought Hitler used when planning the Holocaust. Ignore the fact that anti-Semitism goes back a thousand years in Europe before the rise of the Nazis, or the role of religious symbolism in Nazism, the message the filmmakers want you to believe was clear though: evolution leads to Holocausts.

As one might expect, Stein and Co. do a fairly reasonable job of talking to all sides, though I some how expect that prodigious editing was used to “punch-up” the segments. Stein manages to even get the mother of all atheists (so to speak): Richard Dawkins. Now I’m not exactly Dawkins’ biggest fan, I feel he’s unduly harsh towards all people of faith no matter how harmless they are in their practice. Still, I was spiritually and intellectually with him on this, in what I came to realize was a blatant, stylistic rip-off of Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine. Just as Moore “saved going after” Charlton Heston “till the end,” so Stein does with Dawkins. Then as I thought about it further, one can definitely see the Moore school of documentary at work here, which I though conservatives always considered a “dishonest” and “biased” way of getting the story.

But as a pundit/provocateur all I have to say is that Stein was better off listlessly calling for Beuller and Frye or answering trivia questions to win back his own money. Expelled is sloppy and I don’t see it convincing anyone that there’s a great plot in the scientific community to keep out intelligent design so that atheism can usurp faith. It conjures conflicts where there are none and offers no answers or insight to anyone who might be looking for debate. The sad part is that some people will probably buy this load, and they’re probably the same people who still think Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction are still waiting under a tarp in the middle of the dessert. Hopefully, an audience rejection of Expelled will be the latest, best evidence of natural selection.