As the bustling summer movie season comes upon us, one movie has slipped through the cracks between “Iron Man” and “Harold and Kumar”: Ben Stein has a new documentary out. While I have a quirky respect for him as an actor (he’s the only one I know who can do a slow, droning voice without making me want to slam my head against the TV set), I won’t be going to see his movie.
Rewind to a few days ago, when I first saw a Web ad for the movie, called “Expelled,” and opened up its Web site. Intrigued, I flicked through the intro cutscene, read the brief plot overview and loaded the trailer. It starts with Ben Stein seated in the back row of a classroom asking pointed question after pointed question on the validity of evolution to a blustering and bumbling biology teacher.
But I can’t really say what the rest of the trailer was like, because I clicked the stop button and shut the browser after the first 30 seconds; all my interest had simply disappeared.
Sure, the idea – that the supposed smartest people on the subject of evolution are rejecting the supposed smartest ideas about evolution – makes for a good documentary. The premise uses the same counter-intuitiveness that made “Bowling for Columbine” so popular.
So permit me a bit of counter-intuitiveness of my own, dear reader: intelligent design, the premise of “Expelled,” will have a detrimental effect on religion.
Let us skip over all the current debates of science and religion and just consider what would happen if intelligent design did become the accepted theory.
What would happen to science, first of all? Well, not much. Intelligent design and the current accepted theories agree on most all the details of molecular biology. They agree about the genome, they agree about DNA replication, they agree about mutations, genetic drift, inheritance of traits and so on. Any questions scientists are already asking about those areas now they would still be asking if ID were accepted.
ID is not opposed to evolution, just opposed to abiogenesis, the theory that life can arise, albeit slowly, from no life. So only questions about the origins of life and speciation would change, and even then they would not change very much. ID only proposes the existence of an intelligent designer who guided the creation of the world, but it leaves open the question of how the designer did so. Did the designer just start the world at some arbitrary point and let the rules of biology govern from then on? Are there rules and laws that are fixed, which not even the designer can interfere with? Also, why would the designer create a given creature a given way? What is the purpose of that creature? How does it fit in with the rest of the world? As it is, scientists are already searching for rules of biology and the reasons for why specific traits are useful to the survival of a species. The questions ID gives only change the worldview slightly and the answers might not change much at all.
But what would happen to religion? Intelligent design proposes the existence of an overseer, a guiding, intelligent force which directs evolution. Every deity-based religion would point to it and say, “Ho! There’s proof that we are right.”
And therein lies the stumbling point. The moment religion gets proof, it’s not religion anymore; it’s fact. There’s no faith; everything is given. There’s no wonder; there’s just a footnote in a school biology textbook that students will read, memorize for the test, and quickly forget.
To me, the greatest gift that religion and spirituality can give is hope, the ability to do the right thing and work for good without any expected personal gain, to do it just because you have faith in the inherent goodness in the world. If we give proof to religion, then doing the right thing becomes no different from paying taxes: it becomes mechanical and without meaning. While I would love to see more people doing the right thing, I can’t appreciate a good thing done just because it had to be done; if a person must endure some hardships for doing the right thing, then it shows me that he or she cares about what they do.
So, no thanks, Ben, I won’t be seeing your movie, and not because I think your topic is detrimental to faith. I simply cannot abide the vitriol it contains. Instead, I’m going to do some math and go on hoping that the world will work out all right, and that we will come to some answer in this debate: maybe not the best answer, maybe not the right answer, but a good answer.
I have faith that we will.