Made a good showing
Published on April 21, 2008 By KFC Kickin For Christ In Entertainment

I'm happy to say that "Expelled" broke into the top 10 this weekend.  This is pretty good considering that the movie only opened in 1,052 screens about half as many screens as other top 10 movies. 

Those who have seen the movie have said it was nicely done and that it is not from a Christian perspective by any means.   Here are some of the comments from those who have seen the movie.

-Even Mr. Dawkins at the end admitted to "alien intelligent design."

-My wife and I (a college professor) and some friends (retired high school teachers) went to see this wonderful movie.  It was presented in an intelligent way and Ben made Richard Dawkins look like a fool.  At the end of the movie, the whole auditorium broke into applause.  I have never seen this happen at a movie."

- "Went with a dozen friends!  Great conversation afterwards!  A shockwave went through the world of academia on Friday night." 

- "The movie was exceptional.  Beyond the apparant bias of the academia left, is the scary conclusion of the Darwinian system leading to Hitler's final solution and Margaret Sanger's legacy of racism and eugenics."

On Richard Dawkins:

-"he essentially convicted himself."

-"It was fantastic!" 

"It was very good."

I have yet to read a review of someone who went and had nasty things to say.  While I've heard the left's whining and complaining they are not going, just whining about it from the sidelines. 

I plan on going soon. 

 


Comments (Page 1)
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on Apr 21, 2008
Well...looks like I was right. Propaganda wins yet again. I knew the general public would be swayed...they eat that crap up. Now everyone's going to think creationism is a valid theory.

I weep for the future.

~Zoo
on Apr 21, 2008

Now everyone's going to think creationism is a valid theory.

well.....it is......duh! 

I weep for the future.

there's two ways I could go with this.

1.  I love sensitive men!

2.  Oh....grow up already...put your big boy boxes on! 

 

 

 

on Apr 21, 2008
well.....it is......duh!


Grr...no way.

~Zoo
on Apr 21, 2008

Grr...no way.

As someone with an analytical mind Zoo...aren't you supposed to keep it open to possibilities outside the box?

In all your replies on this subject you seem very closed minded, even hostile toward anything you haven't been taught.

What is up with that?

It seems to me the most logical minded, and the most analytical would agree we don't know all there is to know FOR SURE about the beginnings of the planet.  So that means we don't know anything is FOR SURE WRONG.

Technically, the "real" way the earth was made and its inhabitants could be as yet undiscovered or even considered.

I don't believe it...but I'm just sayin....

on Apr 21, 2008
As someone with an analytical mind Zoo...aren't you supposed to keep it open to possibilities outside the box?


Of course, but you see...scientific method is a little different than being open to possibilites. If you can show me evidence, then I will accept it as a valid theory. I'm very open to anything...but the issue is, there's no concrete evidence- no observation, no physical evidence.

It'd be cool if aliens, the loch ness monster, and ghosts were real too. I can have the hope that they are, I can look for them, I can even believe in them if I want to....but I would never make the assumption that their existence was fact.

It's not about being openminded or hampering free speech, it's about good science. Having an open mind is key to developing hypotheses...but at a certain point you have to admit to yourself that if you can't find evidence, then it's not valid science.

Here's a video about scientific method.



~Zoo
on Apr 21, 2008
My brother went to see this last weekend. I haven't talked to him but my mom said he liked it. He IS a very open-minded, intelligent person, but he is also very religious (spent a few years working as a missionary and is currently working as director of ?? at his church while he's in grad school).

He is one who researches and thinks and questions, so it is a positive for the movie if he felt that it was good.

I would love to see a link that proves Dawkins admitted to intelligent alien design. Having read Dawkins, I seriously doubt he would say something like that except in jest.

(Interesting tidbit...I was going to do a little book challenge with my brother. I would read The Case for Christ and he could read The God Delusion. I mentioned this proposal I had to my mom and she informed me that he had already read it. Hahahaha.)

From my understanding, Expelled is much like a Michael Moore film. Some fact, some twisted fact, and some outright lies, edited in such a way as to drive home the film maker's point.

I will see it eventually. We don't go to the movies much anymore because of the cost and childcare issues, but when it's out on video I am sure we'll rent it.
on Apr 21, 2008
I actually enjoyed that video Zoo...thanks.

But here's something I wonder....

What if Galileo was wrong? Or what if he was only half right? What if some things can be hypothesized and proved with evidence, and some things can't?

I believe there are some things for which there aren't reasonable explanations (with the knowledge we have right now).

How many generations believed the world was flat? The sun circled the Earth? They were the professionals of their period and made hypothesis based on the evidence they had at the time....but they didn't have all the evidence did they? No, they just thought they did. Which is natural...we can't see the future. (Yet, heh)

I don't think all the evidence is revealed to us about a lot of things right now....I don't doubt that in 1000 years we will look back and wonder how real "scientists" could ever think they had it all figured out.

You want to rely on science, and the information we have today. I'm good with that. But I don't think you should limit what might be discovered and uncovered in the future.

By ruling out the possibility science can't explain everything right now, you kinda take yourself out of the game.

If history shows us anything, it shows us we don't know half as much as we think we do when we're thinking it.  

on Apr 21, 2008
Ah, Zoo I see you are having this discussion on another thread.....I don't like arrogance (especially from a n00b) so I don't track his threads much now.....

Don't feel beat up on....I still love ya.

(And feel really bad for grouching at you this weekend. Sorry again.)
on Apr 21, 2008
What if Galileo was wrong? Or what if he was only half right? What if some things can be hypothesized and proved with evidence, and some things can't?


If Galileo was wrong, then someone else would figure it out...or if he was half right, someone would figure out what he missed.

Oh, by the way...nothing can be proven with evidence, merely supported with it. If something can't be supported by scientific methods, then it's not science...that's all there is to it, really. It basically ends up as something in philosophy or legend or religion which are speculative and faith based things.

By ruling out the possibility science can't explain everything right now, you kinda take yourself out of the game.


The day that science thinks it knows everything is the day it stops being science and become religion. Science by its very nature is a never ending quest for knowledge. That's how scientists keep job security. Seriously though, everything is always being investigated, new things discovered, things rewritten, things tossed out, things being supported...science can be pretty dynamic. However, all those changes or discoveries or evidences have to treated a certain way before they can be added to the community as a whole.

Sure we don't know everything, but that doesn't mean everything we know or think we know now is a sham. Based on our evidences, this is how the world works...and if we're right then the technology we create based on that will work as well. So I guess that amounts to some form of "proof."

As stated in the video, if bad science exists then it will eventually be discovered and discarded. All that takes is research and time. The real point of the video was to show all of the work that goes into the formation of a theory...as you can see, it's quite a lot. That's why we don't take "creation science" as seriously as people seem to think we should...there's no evidence, no one does research, it's merely a religious assertation. We can't just accept it as a theory...because it's not.

~Zoo
on Apr 21, 2008
Ah, Zoo I see you are having this discussion on another thread.....I don't like arrogance (especially from a n00b) so I don't track his threads much now.....


I feel like I'm having it damn near everywhere as of late. On the bright side I'm developing my rationale and explanation skills rather well.

I don't like arrogance (especially from a n00b) so I don't track his threads much now.....


I hear ya...but I can be just as arrogant. Fire with fire, as they say.

Don't feel beat up on....I still love ya.




(And feel really bad for grouching at you this weekend. Sorry again.)


Eh, s'alright...no worries.

~Zoo
on Apr 23, 2008

-Even Mr. Dawkins at the end admitted to "alien intelligent design."

 

Hmm, I wonder what Richard Dawkins, himself, says about this part of the movie...oh, here it is.

 

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure – that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).
 

From The Horse's Mouth.

on Apr 24, 2008
So that means we don't know anything is FOR SURE WRONG.


He didn't say it was wrong, he said it was not a valid theory. It could be right, but that doesn't make it anymore of a valid theory.
on Apr 24, 2008
Zoo:
Of course, but you see...scientific method is a little different than being open to possibilites.


So, Zoo, what scientific method is used by atheists to come to a conclusion that there is no God? I can see coming to an agnostic conclusion, since there isn't enough physical evidence to come to a definite conclusion, but atheists seem to use a lack of evidence as proof.
on Apr 24, 2008

So, Zoo, what scientific method is used by atheists to come to a conclusion that there is no God? I can see coming to an agnostic conclusion, since there isn't enough physical evidence to come to a definite conclusion, but atheists seem to use a lack of evidence as proof.


You can't conclude anything on lack of evidence. You can only form a conclusion for something when you have evidence for it or against it.

You can conclude that evolution takes place based on the evidence. You can't conclude God does it because there is no evidence for it.

You also can't conclude that God does or does not exist because there is absolutely no evidence one way or the other. In other words, no evidence for or against=inconclusive.

That's how science and math work, so if Atheists use that as their reasoning, then it's a little flawed.


They can use philosophy and logic to form that conclusion. "If I can't see it, then it doesn't exist." That's not math or science based, though.

Now I have to go run some two population hypothesis tests and confidence intervals for statistics.

~Zoo

on Apr 25, 2008

So, Zoo, what scientific method is used by atheists to come to a conclusion that there is no God?

 

Maybe if people didn't react so strongly at having their beliefs challenged by the existence of a different viewpoint, atheists wouldn't be misrepresented so often - as was just done in this quote.  Don't feel bad about it, though, Ted.  You have millions of people for company in that ignorance, and this isn't the first time I've had to explain it.

 

There is a difference in not believing in something and believing that something is not.  So the answer to your question is "None" because we don't use science to prove their is no God.  If you can find evidence of just one atheist that tries to use science to prove there is no God, you get a basket of cookies.  We don't try to prove there is no God at all.  No true scientist believes you can prove that something doesn't exist.  In fact, forget scientist.  No rational person could think that whether they are a scientist or not.

 

I can see coming to an agnostic conclusion, since there isn't enough physical evidence to come to a definite conclusion, but atheists seem to use a lack of evidence as proof.

 

Agnostics are atheists, too, though they'd be very reticent to admit it.  Gee, I wonder why that would be?  They say "Well, we just think it's impossible to know."  It's an apology for not believing that gets them off the hot seat.  Leaving an avenue for "possible belief in the future should any evidence turn up" doesn't make you any more of a believer right now.

 

Here's an exercise that might clear things up.  Go ask as many atheists as you can find the following question.  "If a being materialized in front of you right now and showed you irrefutably that he was in fact God and did in fact exist, would you believe in him then?"  If you find any that say "No," I'll be surprised.

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