Ben Stein and Rush Limbaugh: Partners in Idiocy

Evolution and intelligent design are both theories that attempt to explain the existence and diversity of past and present life on Earth. The theories may be summarized as follows.

Evolution: Life began on Earth several billion years ago with the appearance of simple single-celled organisms, which likely formed in a deep-sea vent or a 'primordial soup' of a propitious combination of biomolecules. Over time, genetic mutations during reproduction combined with the pressures of natural selection to guide the evolution of life in a myriad of directions. The complex, multi-celled organisms of today - be they people, redwood trees, or electric eels - are simply the latest iterations in extremely long chains of small, gradual genetic changes that have increased organisms' reproductive chances. This theory has been directly observed and proven in microorganisms, and although the generations of macroorganisms are too long to observe their evolution directly, their evolution may be observed through the fossil record. The theory is the underpinning of the entire field of modern biology.

Intelligent Design: God did it.

Incredibly, in our otherwise scientifically advanced day and age, many consider the latter theory to be every bit as scientific and compelling as the former.

One such intellectually decrepit individual is Ben Stein, whose Michael Moore-esque documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, attempts to show the injustice of 'suppressing' intelligent design and its advocates in the academy and the classroom. In Stein's own description, the film follows his "heroic and, at times, shocking journey confronting the world’s top scientists, educators and philosophers, regarding the persecution of the many by an elite few... educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the 'crime' of merely believing that there might be evidence of 'design' in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance."

Stein recently sat down with another half-wit, Rush Limbaugh, for a interview in which they paraded their astonishing ignorance on scientific and logical matters. The following are excerpts from the transcript of that interview, interspersed with my own rebuttals.


Stein: "Expelled" is about the Darwinists, who say that random mutation and random selection explains everything, and who believe that it is their right to fire anybody from any university job if that person even slightly questions the Darwinist worldview.

Wrong already, Ben. Random mutation, yes; but the selection aspect of evolutionary decent is anything but random. The whole point of natural selection is that the pressures organisms face when trying to survive and reproduce encourage evolution in a definite direction. For instance, two examples of random mutation might be slightly better camouflage and slightly worse camouflage. Selection is not at all random: the creature that gets slightly better camouflage will be more likely to survive and pass on that slightly better camouflage to its offspring, whereas the organism whose mutation worsens its camouflage is less likely to do so.

Rush: What is Intelligent Design, as opposed to Creationism?
Stein: Creationism believes that there is a God who created the earth [sic] in some finite, possibly measurable, amount of time. Intelligent Design-ers believe there is some intelligence revealed in the incredible complexity of life and the incredible complexity - and I would say beauty - in the governing principles of the universe... and that it's unlikely that these laws came about by random chance and random mutation and natural selection... Above all, I would say, it questions how the universe went from completely inorganic matter like mud to a living thing like a cell, and then eventually to a human being. [...] I say that we have as much science on our side as the Darwinists. The Darwinists cannot explain how life began... [or] how gravity began... [or] how thermodynamics began. They just take it on faith that it was done by some kind of process, a Darwinist process, and natural selection and random mutation. They don't have any evidence of that. So as long as we are talking about theories of which there is no evidence, why not bring in other theories?

Stein is scientifically illiterate if he thinks that Darwinian Evolution is supposed to explain the origin of the laws of gravity or thermodynamics. That's physics, not biology. No scientist believes that physical laws came about by a "Darwinist process" or natural selection.

How life originated on Earth is indeed still a matter of debate and postulation. But to simply posit "Well, since we don't yet have a good explanation, it must have been God" is to commit the ad hoc fallacy: to answer the question by just making shit up. At least when scientists debate the issue, they refer to evidence like the origins of organic molecules and what conditions under which life can flourish; they don't just throw out an idea for which there is not, nor has never been, any evidence.

To argue that proponents of intelligent design "have as much science on [their] side as the Darwinists" is to talk pure fiction. There is nothing scientific about the ad hoc, unempirical postulations of intelligent design-ers. They are simply bringing ancient superstition to bear against a solid scientific theory that is supported by countless observations in the fossil record and the laboratory.

Throughout, Stein also implicitly advances the first-cause argument: that since everything has a cause, and we don't know what the cause of the universe was, that cause must have been God. This argument has been made in various forms since ancient Greece, and it remains as poor an argument today as it was then. The refutation is simple: what caused God? If everything must have a cause, then God must too (and thus we're faced with infinite regress); if God doesn't have to have a cause, then why must the universe? The first-cause argument doesn't solve anything; it merely trades one problem - the origins of the universe and of life - for another - the origin of God.

Rush: It seems they [Darwinists] have a paranoia about the whole concept of God; they cannot allow for one moment the concept that there is a God. What do they so fear about God?
Stein: I think they fear... that if there is a God, they are going to be judged at some point either in this life or the afterlife, if there is one, and that they will be found to have been violating moral codes. They don't want to be judged. They want to do whatever they want. After all, if they are just specks of mud, animated by a lightening strike, they don't have any moral responsibility to anyone.

Here Stein reveals that he is as illiterate in the field of ethics as he is in science. He unthinkingly assumes that religion is the foundation of all morality, despite the overwhelming evidence in daily life that there is no correlation between religiosity and ethical behavior. There are many religious people who do terrible things, and many non-religious people who lead virtuous and ethical lives; therefore it is not religion itself, but some other factor(s) which determine morality.

In fact, it could be argued that religion is an obstacle to the same "moral responsibility" that Stein so blithely touts. Religious people simply assume that as long as they act in accordance with the laws set down by the religion, they're in the clear. It is precisely this kind of thinking that engenders suicide bombing and all forms of religious persecution. By contrast, the secular person has to find rational justification for his or her actions. I don't steal from my neighbor, not because God told me not to, but because I believe it to be wrong for a number of reasons. Stein's assumption that the irreligious are morally adrift is as insulting as it is, in my experience and observations at least, wildly incorrect.

Scientists do not have a 'paranoia' of God, as Limbaugh would so like to believe; they just ignore God. They don't have time for any superstitious nonsense - God included - for which there is no evidence. God isn't testable; he isn't measurable; he isn't empirically knowable at all, and until it can be shown that he's anything other than a figment of ancient imaginations, science need not bother dealing with him. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." And science is all about evidence.

Rush: You spent two years interviewing more than 150 educators and scientists who claim that they were persecuted for challenging Darwinism. You say that in addition to whatever is involved here in terms of science that it is also a free-speech issue.
Stein: Absolutely.

The dismissal of pro-intelligent-design scientists, which Stein offers as the central and most powerful theme of his film, isn't an issue of free-speech; it's an issue of basic competence. If a chemistry professor started teaching alchemy, he would be fired for being an incompetent chemist. If an astrophysicist began preaching the Ptolmeic geocentric model of the universe, she too would be fired, and rightly so. So why should a biologist who rejects the theory of evolution - which is as central to biology as gravity is to physics - not be fired for gross incompetence? It's one thing if the scientist has actual evidence to question evolution, but they never do, and replacing a major scientific theory with illogical spiritualism is grounds for dismissal if ever there were such.

Stein: Darwinism basically said, at the end of the day, under all this rigmarole, that Northern European white people are destined to rule the world. That, it seemed to me, was a way of justifying the British Empire. Darwinism really was a theory legitimizing a certain political worldview more than anything else. By the way, Hitler's friends picked it up and ran with it - only they said that the Northern European country that was destined to rule the world was called Germany.
Rush: In the movie there is a trip you take with a curator.
Stein: Oh, my God. That was amazing - a Nazi killing center.
Rush: But the jaw-dropping episode shows the guide walking you around, and your facial expressions as she attempts to justify what went on there. You are right when you say that these people don't want to be judgmental. They don't even want to be judgmental about Hitler.

It's unclear how Stein and Limbaugh make the outrageous leap from the topic of Darwinian Evolution to that of the Holocaust, but Nazi similes are always the last refuge of demagogues. Here Stein and Limbaugh put the impressive range of their ignorance on display, conflating genuine Darwinian Evolution with Spencerian social Darwinism, the conservative social theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that had nothing to do with science or Darwin. From what I've read in other reviews, Stein also takes the opportunity in his film to blame evolution for abortion (apparently under the assumption that abortion is a bad thing). Blaming evolution for Nazism and abortion is as daft as giving Jesus credit for the Inquisition, or laying blame on the theory of gravity for the dropping of bombs that kill innocent civilians.

Rush: It [the film] so illustrates the closed-mindedness, the arrogance, and the fear of people who don't think they have to debate what they believe.

Close-mindedness, arrogance, and unjustified, indefensible beliefs - isn't Rush just describing himself here?

It is indeed discouraging that some eighty years after the Scopes Trial, some Americans are still dumb enough to choose religion over science. Stein, Limbaugh, and their willfully ignorant comrades prefer to side with the creation myths of ancient peoples instead of the empirically tested theories of modern biologists. They would fit in more among Neanderthals paying obeisance to the sun rather than among we modern - and evolved - homo sapiens.