Freedom Of Thought

There's a new movie opening this week across the USA that stirs up some very important soup.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" is a doco about the politics of science, and the lack of freedom of academic thought. Specifically, Ben's got himself in a lather over the Darwinism v Intelligent Design debate, a real with-us-or-agin-us stoush where "mainstream science" accepts one view as fact and villifies anyone who promotes or even contemplates the other.

If you haven't been following it, Darwinism states that life evolved by trial and error. Who or what we are is the product of a series of accidents, starting from the very moment life appeared on earth. Intelligent Design proponents believe there's a greater hand in there somewhere. They don't dispute evolution per se, they simply say "maybe the evolution is the result of some intervention somewhere".

Intelligent Designists point to the one question Darwinists can't answer, which is "how was life created?"

Now I don't want to get bogged down here in any creationism v evolution debate. Intelligent Designists don't believe the world was created in 6 days, after which God went off for a beer. All they say is "maybe there was a Hand of God in the evolution of life somewhere".

I don't mind that view. I really have no opinion one way or another, and if they're right, they certainly answer a few hitherto unanswerable questions without challenging a core, scientifically provable fact, which is that life has built within it, a magnificent self replicating, self programming structure called DNA with which it can change (or be changed?) to suit whatever is happening to it.

What does concern me is that, once again, one view, in this case Darwinism, is accepted as unimpeachable truth such that anyone holding an opposing or questioning view is labelled a heretic and figutatively burned at the stake. Don't take this the wrong way. Darwin was a brilliant thinker, and he's on my hero list because he observed and spoke out against the mainstream.

However, what the mainstream Darwinists are now doing to their Intelligent Design colleagues would make Darwin spin in his proverbial grave.

There is a saying in science... "first they ridicule you, then they revile you... and then they adopt your ideas as though they are their own."

Science has no room for dogma. Webster defines this as "A doctrinal notion asserted without regard to evidence or truth; an arbitrary dictum". Yet isn't this what we now see in mainstream academia?

Ask yourself... is "Humans-Did-It Climate Change" provable science or politically motivated dogma?

Is "High Cholesterol Is Bad For You" the mantra of a vested interest, or is it also just more dogma?

None of this is new, of course. Medicine use to think washing hands before surgery was quackery. Physicists used to think matter was made up of solid stuff. And Astronomers used to think the Sun revolved around the Earth

I don't care what the issue is. No Thought Police State is acceptable under any circumstance. Scientists must be free to follow the evidence, and not the money, fashion or vested interest.

To watch the trailer, click HERE to go to the Expelled website.