I am no evolutionary biology expert, and I am really not much of a biologist in general, so I have no critique of the debate between Darwinism and Intelligent Design as presented by Ben Stein in his movie Expelled, I do have three issue with his movie though:
One
Ben Stein at one point while discssing the origins of life mocks both the idea that life could have originated when molecules piggy backed on the formation of crystals which created the order that allowed life, and more ironic to me mocked the idea of Panspermia, the concept that extraterrestials seeded life on earth, (which this does not solve the problem of where life came from, because the aliens had to have come from somewhere) Ben Stein fails to aknowledge the face that panspermia is actually just another way of saying Intelligent Design, an alien intelligence for its own reasons chose to intelligently design life to survive on Earth. That and of course the old argument of the idea of lightning strikes causing the 250 base sets of proteins to line up perfectly. Life originated on Earth what 4.5 Billion years ago, give or take a few million years, how many lightning strikes are there per year? The department of energy reports over 8 million lightning strikers PER DAY, which adds up to over 3 billion lightning strikes per year, so from the point of the earth being friendly enough for primordial ooze to form to when life actually evolved, I am going to low ball and say a million years (there is a 1.2 billion year time period in between the formation of the earth and the first cells as estimated, but I want to go with a million, cuz I can) and assuming every lightning strike has only enough energy to cause one chance of protein alignment (it apparently has significantly more, as in every lightning strike could spin the wheel of chance a couple hundred times to evolve life, but lets go with one) that means there are 3 x 10^15 chances for life to spontaneously evolve, and going with a evolution skeptics (from Ben Stein’s movie) random statistical likelihood of life spontaneously evolving of 1 in a trillion, that means there was at least 3000 points at which the 250 proteins lined up perfectly, and only one of those 3000 points had to survive long enough to make a replicate of itself. And I am no mathematician, and all of my numbers were found doing quick google searches online in the 10 minutes I took to write this, wonder how higher (or lower) the number goes with someone who knows what they are doing.
Two:
Ben Stein goes to Germany, and goes to see the hospitals and concentration camps where the Nazis went about committing genocide. Regular Darwinism and Evolution are dropped as way Nazis justified their programs. Except the way Ben Stein defines Darwinism, Nazis were never Darwinists. They believed they could use forced evolution to return to their ideal of a perfect race, but they did not believe that humans evolved from primordial ooze billions of years ago. They believed that they were annointed by a higher power to rule all the lesser races, that they were descended from Angels (angels do not exist in Darwin’s Origin of Species), they hated Catholics but believed Protestantism was the true religion (or one of the true religions) so when Ben Stein equated Nazisim with Darwinism he was spreading false information. Not only that but it was kind of sad to see him take that path, he moved his movie away from being a critique on the conflict ongoing between Intelligent Design and Darwinism, and towards a simple attack on Darwinism by associating it with evil. Not only that but just because Evil used an idea doesn’t make that idea evil, cuz that is saying every doctor killing pro-lifer has just made the concept of a higher power being pro-life evil, in my opinion.
Three:
A scientist was waxing about his ideal Utopia, one where religion has been regulated to a quaint hobby, and where science rules the world, and how perfect it would be. Ben Stein then does a video over of the only path a relgion free world can go and goes to Soviet Russia. Which is kind of stupid, Soviet Russia removed religion and replaced it with loyalty to the state and communist party, not scientific research and education, as the scientist invisioned. And of course he gave no aknowledgement to the path that allow religion to dominate can take, oh wait, that has turned out so well, or it has never been truly attempted I guess.
In the end I believe any origin of existence runs into the same roadblock. For the Big Bang theory, the energy that created the Universe has always been there and will always be there, while for religion the higher power has always been there and will always be there. Both had to have come from something, which in turn must have come from something.
I am not against Intelligent Design, but I think it could be taken as a cop out, i.e. this molecule is too complex instead of continuing to study it, lets say it was Intelligently Designed.
And a very adult SUCK IT BEN STEIN