Leticia at Catholic Media Review found this interesting trailer for Expelled, a docu-drama that looks at how scientists who espouse intelligent design are discriminated against.
What I find interesting, in reading Brett McCracken's review is that this seems to be not as much about defending intelligent design as defending the right to discuss it at all. (Jeffrey Overstreet showed me the way to the review.)
UPDATE
It is only natural for this to bring up a discussion of intelligent design in general. We had quite the conversation about that around here a while ago which overflowed into other places. Steven Riddle, a Catholic and scientist, at Flos Carmeli wrote what basically is my point of view (so glad he did that!). I am putting a bit of it below, but please do go over and read the whole thing before commenting here one way or the other. Just so we're all on the same page, ya know ...
Scientists who attack intelligent design as "not science" are not being entirely true to themselves. It would be equally valid to attack neo-darwinism. Neo-darwinism is the philosophical construct that grew up around Darwin's original proposal of evolutionary theory. While neodarwinism added some aspects to the theory as a whole (for example allopatric speciation), it also set on top of evolution an interpretive framework. Although the scientists using it would probably think of it as value neutral, it is not. Neo-darwinism assumes as its underpinning the absolute randomness of everything that happens in the natural world and in the mixing of genes. But absolute randomness is, in fact, an axiom, an expectation and it is improvable. Moreover, it is loaded with a philosophical bias that makes the theory including it untestable. ...Updated Yet Again
The objection to intelligent design is not that it is bad science (although this is what scientists might tell you) it is that it contravenes a necessary assumption of science and the way science works to make a special exception for a sensitive case. The objection to intelligent design is that it is a philosophical assumption that poses as a theory. It offers nothing that evolution does not offer already. It is simply the theistic side of the coin. Atheists (Dawkins among them) argue that evolution proceeds in a random fashion (a point they cannot prove with any evidence whatsoever) and theists say that it proceeds by design. In either case the mechanism is as Darwin originally suggested--natural occurrences acting upon a population.
So, intelligent design is not a scientific theory, it is a philosophical construct. Evolution IS a scientific theory that must carefully be teased apart from a philosophical assumption of "no intervention." Proper teaching of evolution would require a very careful statement that we can assume nothing about how the mechanism proceeds. What appears random may be random but we cannot prove randomness. What we assume to be guided could be guided, but we can even less assume that.
Jonathan got to see it at a pre-release screening this week. He says it's very well done, but can't really say much else because they asked people not to review it yet. Suffice it to say that he used the expression, "gave the Darwinists enough rope to hang themselves."So says Amanda Witt at Wittingshire. She also gives us the links to Expelled's site as well as to where Thinking Christian is keeping an eye on the whole thing.
Meanwhile, in these very comments boxes, there is some interesting discussion coming from Catholic scientists ... I like to see what everyone says even though I am barely up to the discussion. Check it out.
