Slashdot Mirror
Ben Stein's 'Expelled' - Evolution, Academia and Conformity
eldavojohn writes "Painting the current scientific community as just as bad as the Spanish Inquisition, an extended trailer of Ben Stein's "Expelled" has a lot of people (at least that I know) talking. It looks like his movie plans to encourage people to speak out if they believe intelligent design or creationism to be correct. In the trailer he even warns you that if you are a scientist you may lose your job by watching 'Expelled.' Backlash to the movie has started popping up and this may force the creationism/evolutionist debate to a whole new level across the big screen and the internet."
adholden points out a site called Expelled Exposed, which asserts that 'Expelled' "is simply an anti-science propaganda film aimed at creating controversy where none exists, while promoting poor science education that can and will severely handicap American students."
On one side we've got a bunch of scientists - who's philosophy espouses striving for neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc.
On the other side, we've got.... an ex-Nixon speechwiter/game show host.
*sighs* - I bet he's skeptical about anthropomorphic climate change too (there seems to be an extraordinarily high overlap between the two groups).
Oh, and he Godwins himself at 2:40 in the linked video. Discussion over.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
to Expelled, a movie full of ad hominems, half truths, non sequiturs and promoting ignorance!
Hey! Look a Distraction!
There was a debate? When?
Oh, right, in America. Oh you silly Americans. I guess the age of the American Empire is truly over. You're hell bent on driving your population into the next Christian Dark Age, while China is preparing to whip your ass. Good luck with that.
If evolution or non-creationism is correct, and by having a dialogue people are convinced of this fact...then what is the problem? After watching the extended trailer that is the feeling I came away with. Ben's point is that discussion is not being permitted in academia, and in fact the opposite is happening, it is being suppressed.
I can recommend the recent Skepticality pod cast on this topic (#74). There are interviews with shermer and dawkins that give some insight to how this movie is constructed.
It is available at skepticality.com and reposted and richarddawkins.net
Meh... As long as both are prefixed with "theory of", who cares?
Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one. -Arthur Dent
Isn't one of the points of the movie that while scientists espouse neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc. that they are not actually following it?
(Disclaimer --> haven't seen the movie or any trailers, the above was a genuine question for anyone who has actually seen the movie, and not an attempt to troll. Also the question should not imply that I agree with or disagree with the movie. It really is JUST a question.)
He's missing the issue. The truth is, I believe some form of "intelligent design." But whether or not I believe it or a billion people believe it is irrelevant. Intelligent design, as has been discussed here and elsewhere, ad infinitum, it's NOT SCIENCE and should not be taught as science or as an alternative to evolution.
On the other hand, if they want to teach it in a Religious Studies type class, I'm all for it. Go for it. That's precisely where it belongs.
I though, and then googled him.
... I've always wondered why law is considered a science), but his opinion on intelligent design and evolution means diddly squat.
So he's a comedian, a writer, a white-house speech writer, a law professor and a believer in intelligent design.
Fine, another one of those scientist who think that being a scientist, they can have a scientific opinion on any subject out there.
He's a lawyer, he can have scientific stances on law (if that's possible anyway
Feel free to believe in an Old Man in the Sky, and to embrace ID. Just don't forget to mention that scientific evidence points the other way.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Its not just "Darwinists" that force their anti-Jesus dogma on the education system. I had a similar experience in my childhood.
Given a circle with a radius of 10, whats the circumference? Some would say thats its 10 * 2 * "pi"!
But what is this pi? They can't even define it;its completely irrational! Meanwhile they suppress the controversy. When I put down a much more reasonable answer - 60, because the literal Bible tells me the circumference of a circle is 2*r*3, I was marked wrong! The Nazis used these numbers to build their war machine and concentration camps and its being taught to children far to young to understand its deceptiveness. Inquiring minds are led to a literally endless and patternless series of numbers intended to confuse and dull the mind.
Teach the controversy!
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand the distinction, and people like Dawkins don't help. Many religious types treat 'discounting an argument for god(s)' the same as 'advancing an argument against god(s)', and go ballistic. But it's important to note the difference. There's still room to believe in god(s) even if you accept the ridiculously overwhelming evidence that evolution happened and is happening. (I don't believe in god(s), FWIW, but many people do.)
Stein and his ilk really remind me of the worst features of Ned Flanders sometimes. "Well, I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!"
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
BTW, the reason that evolution can be talked about in school and ID should not is that evolution is science, and can change as new information is acquired. Evolution is not based on any traditional truth. It is based on observation, and it's connection to the holy, if any, is only incidental. OTOH, ID is based on a specific group creation myth, and promoting ID is like promoting religion, something the US government should not do. If we want a survey of creation myths, that is such a large topic that it needs a course all of it's own, and many would support such course, except, I suspect, those that want to teach ID, as such seem often afraid of competing knowledge, perhaps because the truth will set you free,
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
To cut short any discussion from those who think that a religious precept should be included in a scientific curriculum, I submit this quote from one of the linked articles so everyone is clear as to why ID is not science:
"Intelligent Design" fails to meet the basic definition of a scientific idea: its proponents do not present testable hypotheses and do not provide evidence for their views that can be verified or duplicated by subsequent researchers.
That's all there is to it folks. ID supporters need to submit evidence to back up their claim and it will be considered. So far, the only thing ID supporters have done is a) try to show supposed holes in current Evolutionary theory (all of which have been answered) and b) claim that some unknown, untestable, omnipotent force is behind everything. At no time have they ever presented evidence to support their idea and so, rightly, ID falls under the heading as an idea which attempts to support someone's religious ideas.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
As a European person a question pops into my mind a lot lately
"why is the US going backwards in the last decade? who is gaining from this dumbing down of the population??"
Remember if intelligent design is correct then it can be explained, demonstrated and then analysed further. Until then it is as much a waste of time as it is trying to work out how much flour Flying Spagetti Monster is made up of.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
This whole debate seems pretty strange to European eyes. I consider myself to be a fundamentalist Bible believing evangelical Christian, but, in Britain, people like me take the view that Genesis describes the evolutionary process pretty well. Although many Evangelicals support Intelligent Design or Young Earth Creationism, there's little opposition within Christian circles to full acceptance of the scientific explanation of the origins of life.
Between this and support for a right-wing social and foreign policy agenda, I sometimes wonder if American evangelicals read the same Bible that I do.
Stein does not reject Darwinism for the evolution of individual species. He rejects that it is the answer for why life exists and why the universe works that way that it does.
Isn't it ironic that a whole generation of religious folks are doing nothing more than routing their kids into a backwater. Suspicion of science just means their children will distrust science and math and be shuttled, therefore, into a legion of burger flippers. Teaching your kids that Intelligent Design is the right answer is as close to child abuse as I can imagine.
Because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plankton (with a few plants and dinosaurs), but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
They ignore you because you obviously don't know what you're talking about.
Then they mock you because you expect to be taken seriously without putting in the work to become informed.
Then they fight you, because you won't go away until you've had your fight, and ingrained in your thinking, so deeply you don't know it's there, is the notion that might makes right.
Then you win, because there are so many ignorant, lazy, belligerent people that sooner later sensible people, who want to get something accomplished with their lives, will sooner or later give up on picking sense out of your nonsense.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There's so much I would like to say here, and I rather doubt that I'll get it all said, but I'll make a stab at it. In the first place, I haven't seen the movie, so can't really comment on Stein's take. However, I have looked at the "sociology" of the Evolution/Intelligent Design/Creationism debate a fair amount, and what I see disturbs me from all sides. One major concern I have is the elevation of Darwinian natural selection as a means of species creation to an unrealistic importance. I just don't see why it's so important in and of itself. One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism). It seems to me that one could even be a quite competent practitioner of any of the biological sciences (other than the various sorts of paleontology) without necessarily agreeing with Darwinism. Yet, we are constantly told that a failure to teach Darwinism at the high school level will destroy science education as we know it and result in a US population that is hopelessly ignorant of all science, etc. etc. I just don't buy it. Bluntly, I can scarcely think of a job where a belief in Darwinism is necessary. On the other hand, we have school systems that literally teach absolutely no information science, computer science, etc. etc., and people graduating from college who literally don't know the different between a byte and a gigabyte. It's hard for me to see why this ONE THING is so vitally important, when it has virtually no practical application and there are scientific topics with enormous practical application that go untaught. Could the real problem be social or (speak softly now) political? It seems to me that that is exactly the case. The extraordinary efforts put forth by various scientific bodies to defend Darwinism from all criticism strike me as a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk fear that the Scope's trial will happen all over again. This isn't about science--it's about continuing the Enlightenment project of supplanting all sources of Meaning (capitalization intended) with Scientific Meaning. That doesn't mean that I think that Darwinism is wrong. I actually think that it's as right as you're going to get within the boundaries that it sets itself. But I certainly don't think that the loss of Darwinism would destroy American education or anything along those lines. So ... people... GET A GRIP.
My $0.02.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Uh... because there is exactly zero evidence supporting other theories? Because other theories are largely unscientific, untestable, and not falsifiable? Because creationists still don't understand that evidence against one theory do NOT automatically equate to support for an alternate theory*? Because evidence from every branch of science, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to physics to zoology all support the currently accepted theory? You know, those sorts of things kind of tend to make people really, really tired of dealing with folks like Ben Stein, who remain obstinately and willfully ignorant.
(*e.g., if this fruit is not an orange, that does not mean it is automatically an apple... heck, could be a kumquat, for all you know).
Umm... Stein is not discussing the Science. But, the Atheistic philosophy of Darwinism that says its all an accident and random. ID creationism. Stein points out this very attitude and those that use their power to silence opposition.
ex nihilo nihil fit
... is the closing of minds
ideas are dangerous to closed minds.
80 years ago the "establishment" was opposed to teaching the theory of evolution - now the "establishment" doesn't want to discuss the possibility that evolution is "bad" science.
I also like the fact that the "enlightened pro-evolution" people are usually the ones resorting to argumentum ad hominem...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
During the whole montage he's writing something over and over on the blackboard and it comes out to be something like "I will NOT question Darwinian Evolution." He interviews scientists and editors who have lost their jobs for printing/writing papers that claim our DNA has a 'code' with information that could not have happened in nature.
Disclaimer, I read a lot of Darwin/Dawkins/Gould so I'm pretty biased here
I think that even though it's 'a waste of time,' it's bad to write these people off or fire them. I'm sure there's sound criticism against these papers and authors but Ben Stein isn't showing that in his movie if there is.
If you have friends who believe in Creationism, respect them and provide for them sound arguments against it. It may be a waste of time to you but it's complete snobbery to write them off. Ben Stein is correct that you may lose friends if you watch that movie and become polarized by it--don't let that happen!
Like a Michael Moore movie, objectivity is raped, killed, gutted and donned over a rich man's face who then can safely tell you what to think.
My work here is dung.
But seriously, it's Ben Stein making a movie!?!? Why is this going to be "promoting poor science education that can and will severely handicap American students"?
Listen, there are VERY FEW MOVIES of which I would ever suggest to a kid to _learn_ from. As a boilerplate, if you see it on TV, it is probably fiction (except for most of what discovery et al have in their programming, you can generally learn from those).
But come on! It's a religiously themed movie that seems to take after those awful Moore movies. Buy a ticket or don't, but why blow this up (in typical American fashion) and out of proportion?
Get over it, it's a movie, move on, ride a bike or something and forget about it.
Because I can find lots of stories that make me I am glad the crazies here don't express their religion by bombing people... like , in, uh wonderfully enlightened Europe.
/. that this qualifies as a story. I guess a few editors need to get their brownie points with the insecure techie crowd... the one that needs to vilify anyone with belief and the willingness to express it. (plus its also good fodder for anti-Bush people who claim some hair brained connection to him however tenous)
Really, do you guys not get the news we do? Burning cars in France, oh I know, the PC word is immigrants. Killing of writers in Europe because they dared to write about someone's god?
What you have here in America is exaggeration. Look at it this way, if its brought up over and over and made to look silly it probably is. The haters need something to jump up and down about to make themselves feel superior and these ID people are a great target. The ID people are not a great percentage, just a convenient target.
It says even more for
mod to me to hell if you like, but it is true that it takes a big does of exaggeration to make ID people out as a representative of America or religious America.
Bring out the haters, this thread should have lots of them.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
My work here is dung.
One well known evolutionary scientist P.Z. Myers was queueing up to see a preview screening of this movie, when he was singled out of line and asked to leave the cinema. So he was expelled from Expelled, presumably because he would write it up for the trash it was. A double irony was he was standing next to Richard Dawkins who was apparently not recognized and allowed in.
In order for something to be a theory, it must be testable and falsifiable. "My invisible friend did it" is *not* a theory.
I always find these discussions interesting. The fun thing about it is, there is no way to be 100% sure. Yes, geological and biological evidence points (a lot) towards evolution. The Bible says 7 days. You have some Christians that believe that is a literal translation, and some that reference "a day is like unto a thousand years to God" and vice versa - so those 7 days could be millions of years. The problem comes down to - to many believers put God into a box, and try to limit his abilities by their own understandings of the universe. On the flip side, how can you scientifically test that God exists, and there for that He Created? If you could, that would negate Faith by it's own definition. Which basically is what this comes down to for each individual who actually cares about ID vs Evolution..... Either you have faith in God, and believe in 7 days, or I.D,.... or, you have faith that I.D. or Creation is not a possiblity, or can't exist because Science can't prove it. This debate will never be put to rest because of it's nature.
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
You know a movie's in trouble when the main response from mainstream movie critics is roughly "deceptive propagandist shit-pile", but the real fun comes when you start reading up on the people who were supposedly expelled. Like the Smithsonian employee who had his keys taken away and was fired, thrown out of his office, and thrown off the editorial staff of a journal.
Well, he was fired from his unpaid assistant job at the Smithsonian. Well, his contract for his unpaid assistant job expired. Well, it expired and they gave him a new one. But he was sacked from the journal! Oh, his contract expired there too. Well, there's his office of course, they took that away. Well they moved him into a crappy office. Well, they moved him into his own office. They took his keys away, though! They took everyone's keys away in his whole building! And, uh, they replaced them with keycards.
This is clearly the most honest movie of all time.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Just because the "establishment" does not want to discuss totally futile nonsense like the squaring of a circle or perpetuum mobiles, this does not mean they have closed minds. Its is just extremely boring and a useless waste of time to go through the same nonsense over and over again.
Creationims is nonsense. It adds nothing to scientific insight. Theism is useless. It adds nothing to scientific insight.
Yes, scientists can be very closed minded and stubborn and even stupid. And "the scientific community" can falsely disregard insights and new ideas for a while. That has happened and still happens all the time.
But creationism is so fundamentally wrong and nonsensical in so many ways that the contrary can be said: somebody actively supporting anything that so fundamentally goes against all scientific rational thinking disqualifies him- or herself as a scientist.
A physicist building a perpetuum mobile should get fired. A biologist teaching creationism or ID should get fired on similar grounds.
He's totally right, science in academia should be more about discussing what you believe and less about what science people have found out after observation and experimentation.
For example the other day when my chemistry teacher told me that material stuff is made of atoms, I really couldn't believe him. I think I should have been given the right back then to discuss with them about my theory that everything is conformed by milk derivatives.
I shouldn't really have to prove my theory or even get the smallest amount of evidence pointing to the certainty of my theory before being given the opportunity to have kids at school discuss about it.
And all what I said in this post is the truth, because if you read this post you may lose your job.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Now I admit there are a lot of atheists out there who understand science just as badly as some Christian fundamentalists and have turned it into some kind of religion, but that says nothing about the validity of the science itself, just like idiot Christians say nothing about the validity of the Christian faith.
As another European I can only agree that it seems a particularly American idea that capital-S Science is waging a "war on religion". Most people here seem to be of the opinion that Christian beliefs don't interfere with an scientific approach to most subjects (granted, when ethical decisions come into play religion often tries to dictate a position, but that wouldn't affect the age of the earth or evolutionary explanations). Most religious persecutions happened ages ago, the Enlightenment changed the stance of the general populace a whole freaking lot.
As an aside: if you really want to see how typically American the problem with Bible-thumping Christians is - just look at the book they take their beliefs from. It won't be the Aramaic original, it won't be one of the early Greek or Latin translations, it will be a comparatively recent translation that has all the biases, word choices and mistranslations from latter centuries built in ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" or "camel through the eye of a needle" come to mind). If those people really cared about their Holy Book, their writings giving to them from a divine being, they'd surely try to get as close to the original, the source, as possible, wouldn't you think?
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
Intelligent Design cannot be falsified, therefore it is not science. ID can explain Pegasuses, dragons unicorns and cyclopses just fine. That makes it useless, since that also means it cannot predict anything. Without predictions, you cannot have new scientific insight.
I lost my sig.
Anyone look at the comments on YouTube? Almost unanimous support for Stein's movie. How interesting....
Noam Chomsky said a number of years ago that since conservatives have been successful in rolling back virtually all of the New Deal (with Social Security the only thing left really), they were now working on rolling back the achievements of the Progressive Era. The prime example of that for me was the Exxon (aka Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (aka Standard Oil of New York) merger, putting back together an oil monopoly that had been broken up by the government in 1911. Now that the Progressive Era seems beginning to falter, it looks like they are taking an ax to an even older structure. Which would be the foundations of liberalism (classical or otherwise) and the Enlightenment - rationality and the scientific process.
Someone is challenging us to ask questions?
Someone is telling us to stand up for our beliefs?
Seriously people, Ben Stein is doing a service to the scientific community by encouraging critical thinking and making people challenge the status quo. Besides, science is the biggest group-think boys club there is. Just ask anyone who's ever challeneged string theory. There's scant evidence supporting it, there are way too many variations of it to be taken seriously, and anyone who comes up with an alternate theory (see variable gravity theories) is laughed out without anyone even looking at their paper.
I still am in awe on how idiotic people are in 2008.
There is no need for conflict between the two.
It is not incomprehensible to see the universe was created by a higher power, who set into motion the laws of natural selection and everything we see in it.
Ugh.
I firmly believe in science and a higher power that created it all, so it baffles me every day (well, it doesn't entirely, an average IQ of 100 does explain it well) that people are debating something that doesn't need a debate and are arguing something that has no conflict.
Now, does anyone have a link to that paper?
so what underlies an otherwise intelligent religious person to resist evolution?
we need to confront the real underlying psychological issue here: faith in humanity
religious folk view something like evolution as a path to meaninglessness, nihilism, cynicism. your typical secular humanist expresses their faith in mankind directly: there is no conflict between evolution and being positive about mankind's future
but religious folk's minds don't work like that. for a religious person, their faith in humanity is indirect. it is tied up in symbols and code words, like god. god is really just a psychological manifestation of an abstract concept: an ideal man, what humanity strives for, progress
and around an idea like god, you get all of these related mythologies that again, are really just props for retaining and reaffirming and indirect positivistic faith in society and mankind
so what really divides the secular humanists and the religious folk are those with no faith in mankind. when you look at something like evolution, and you consider your traditional religious symbology that enforces your faith, you are confronted with a crisis. and you look at some of the nihilism in the world. not the atheists who believe in mankind, but the cynical, empty, boorish loud kind of atheist who sees no meaning in life, and you react to that. and so you react to evolution: it seems to be a path to this sort of empty faithless indolent nihilism
in other words, the negative reaction to evolution by otherwise intelligent religious folk is really a reaction against the idea of meaningless in life
this is the psychological issue which underlies the rejection of evolution by otherwise intelligent religious folk. and so the real way you defeat their resistance is by criticizing faithless nihilism. those who use evolution as a story about how mankind is meaningless, pointless: you attack and reject them
you talk about evolution, AND you talk about faith in humanity and you talk about evolution as reinforcing meaning, not destroying it. and in such a way, you draw down the resistance of intelligent religious folks to evolution, by demonstrating to them that evolution is not a threat to the idea of faith, that plenty of secular humanists with faith in mankind can also beleive in evolution, without some sort of psychological dissonance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
First, I would like to say that I a fan of Ben Stein. But this movie is blemish in what I think is an outstanding career. I will explain.
I too have asked the same exact questions that your trailers ask. But I do have answers. I've followed the I.D. vs evolution debate, and I come down firmly on the evolution side. But that is not what you ask about...
Scientific inquiry first clashed with religion when a man innocently attempted to determine the motion of the heavenly bodies in an effort to determine God's intent. This man was Newton, but he started a long battle of God giving up ground to science. For as long as science is practiced, the domain of God has reduced. It is likely that at some time in the future that we have "God" reduced to the fundamental constants of the universe. (Only in terms of a mechanical sense, not spiritual) This can only be the case if scientific inquiry is allowed to continue.
The problem I have, and as it seems schools (public and private), and government have as well with I.D. people being key in scientific discovery , is that it threatens further scientific discoveries. The threat is not intentional, or, at least I believe in most cases it is not intentional (but the Dover school district it was quite intentional). The reason why it threatens scientific discovery, was shown in the Dover court case. The cellular structure that was heralded as 'irreducible' was actually shown to be reducible. Once the researcher was content with the idea that the structure was irreducible, scientific inquiry ended. This is not acceptable. It is not acceptable in projects funded by public or private grants. I fear if I.D. was ever accepted as a viable answer, all sufficiently complicated systems would be described as I.D. and we'd throw our arms up and declare ourselves done. I could imagine a time when all things are attributed to I.D. and such a time scares me.
I do not think that all professors who suppose I.D. would be haphazard, but it is not a risk we do not have to take. The question is if there is room for I.D. and a mind that is willing to probe deeper. Can someone have reverence and probe deeper? Newton did, so it is possible, but I doubt all of the I.D. proponents could.
The biggest failure of I.D. is to factor in the value of processes. And really this is what it boils down to. With I.D. there is no process, and it is all design. With science it is all process and no design. For the past 400 years, we've had nearly every process that has been attributed to God be re-attributed to a process. The question then is God a process, or is God designed? If God is a process then there can be no irreducible complexity, and I.D. effectively eats itself. Processes happen in the domain of time, so the question then becomes what is the domain of time for life on earth. We see evolution happening here on earth, so when did that start? And then the question is what was the process for earth? Answering that question is a question of celestial processes arising in planet formation and going back to the beginning of the universe.
Given then that we are the result of processes, how relevant or prevalent is I.D.? Is there any I.D. still left? It would seem that if the I.D. of our creator was irreducible, then we could never replace any part of the design. This would mean we could only add-on to make alterations (adaptation) and this would create more complication from the base simplicity. The neat feature is that any design is completely mutable. You can bury the original design so deep it could not be discerned. What I am describing of course is DNA. However the smallest number of genes for an independent organism is 1500 genes. This would be a boon for I.D. as until there are 1500 genes, there is no way to evolve and combine 1500 genes at once. However, these genes do contain junk DNA, showing that they were created by a process. The only thing I can conclude, and indeed others should be able to conclude, is that we don't understand the process. This is where scientists who don'
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Evolution is observable fact. The theory is as to how it occurs. Scientific theories need to be based on observable facts and be falsifiable. So in no way can the theories of evolution be called bad science unless you're not talking about science at all.
You can hand wave about conspiracies all you like, but science has an easy to follow method, and creationists can introduce any scientific theories they like. They merely need to be scientific.
Now ID is "bad" science as it doesn't put forward any testable theories at all, put in a few testable theories based on facts and you might have something that looks like science. Though they may have some problems getting there.
It sounds to me that a lot of the noise in the ID crowd is to close minds to the facts and replace them with fantasy rather than anything that can be tested.
It's a bit sad that this discussion always seems to fall back to 'But evolution contradicts god' and similar bla bla.
The point most people miss, is that the person that actually wrote down a lot of his observations, which lead to the idea of evolution, was trying to show how marvelous God created this universe. That a God could make something so complex and self sustaining as evolution amazed him endlessly.
His point was more along the lines that 'Intelligent Design' created all the basework for the great replication and diversion of what came to be known as 'Evolution'.
As I said, a shame a lot of people seem to completely miss that point.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
he's a rebel. He's stickn' it to the establishment by conforming to an establishment... He's a tricky one. Thank GOD for people like him that compel us to think inside the box.
BTW on his game show "Win Ben Stein's Money" I recall him doing poorly on the SCIENCE and SPACE categories.
Sorry, I mean "there is no Darwinism".
The theory of the origin of species through natural selection does not actually address the question of the origin of life, it merely documents a mechanism that has been demonstrated sufficient to explain the phenomenon of speciation. That's all it attempts to do, and that's all it needs to do.
You are creating a straw man, called "Darwinism", that doesn't bear any but a superficial relationship to the reality. Attacking straw men is a blast, it's great fun, but it belongs in the pages of "Mad Magazine", not in the courts and public debate.
I will illustrate your point, with an example I saw on CNN:
But you don't really illustrate the point - the OP was talking about scientists, and you illustrated the point with a story about a journalist and an environmental activist.
Oh - and can you pls link to the CNN article?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Scientific American has a good review of the movie (from the viewpoint of the evil scientists of course): http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie
Richard Dawkins offers his views: Lying for Jesus?
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Read my blog.
Actually... it's much more likely that they don't know what "theory" means.
The reason they don't get published is because their work isn't science. That's the problem with ID as a scientific hypothesis -- there's no way to test it.
IDers present stupid arguments, and then complain they are being persecuted by scientists. Apparently, idiots hate it when you call them idiots.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The comments here are basically taking the movie at it's word -- that Intelligent Designers are being "expelled" from academia.
This is a lie. The whole movie is a lie. The irony of both invoking Nazis, yet so successfully implementing the "Big Lie" strategy has to set some kind of reprehensible high water mark.
The three "expelled" people presented in the movie -- these are the worst stories the filmmakers could find -- involved a professor who failed to get tenure because he wasn't good enough, a woman who had her contract run out and didn't have it renewed, and them someone who said he was "fired" from the Smithsonian, despite actually being an unpaid research assistant whose term ran out.
Compare and contrast.
This movie makes utterly baseless claims that the academic freedom of ID proponents is under attack.
This is a lie.
Yet, they tell the lie, and then you look at comments about the movie, and you have people assuming that the truth is "somewhere in the middle", or that "both sides need to be considered", or some other trite cliche.
Why do they get a free pass here? Seriously, the production of this movie has been filled with lies by the makers -- these allegedly religious people -- and yet, people still take the movie at face value.
They lied to the interviewees, they attempted to pirate animations used in the movie, after being humiliated during the pre-release screenings they lied to cover it up, they lied to the people who wanted to see screenings -- they're liars.
And then you look at comments here, and people talk like the movie makes valid arguments -- it does not. Aside from lies about academic suppression, it's just one long Godwin -- "there's a very tenuous link between social Darwinism and the philosophy of the Nazis, therefore believing in Evolution leads to the Holocaust".
If, in an argument, someone tells baseless, reprehensible lies about a subject, the truth isn't "somewhere in the middle". The liars are really just lying.
Actually, there is a good bit of symmetry here. I often say that the Intelligent Design(ID) people admire how the Man Made Climate Change (MMCC) people have pushed their cause. If you believe in the scientific method you have no problems with anyone challenging a theory. In fact, you'd welcome it because it either disproves the theory or makes it more accurate.
Evolution has advanced in it's "completeness" as a theory because of many challenges made to it over the years, and those challenges have helped science immensely. Just because a theory is wideley accepted however, does not mean that it is correct. Prior to Plate Tectonics being widely accepted it was scorned and rejected by leading scientists who had careers built on "old science." This incidentally what the subject line of this post refers to: subduction is one continental shelf sliding under another, and orogeny is mountain building (of course since this is /. let me point out IANAG).
Yet because the heart of Geophysics is still physics, these great scientists were able to accept challenges and look at the new theory and say "yes -- this fits better." And that's what's awesome (and to me holy) about SCIENCE. You can challenge ANY assertion, and if your model is better, it will persuade people. I'm sure some physicist can help me out and show how the theory of gravity has changed massively since Newton -- even though a lay person would say "yeah, I get gravity."
So here's where Expelled and ID fall down -- we KNOW their theory. What is being taught in schools about evolution is mostly demonstrable. We can show evolution in anti-biotic resistant strains of bacteria, that directly impacts humans and health. ID is being taught in the appropriate places -- houses of worship -- where challenges are heresy. Yet in teaching SCIENCE in schools we want to teach that every assertion CAN be challenged and should be observable. That's what science is -- an attempt to understand the universe through observation and experimentation. If someone wants to challenge something in science and can bring legitimate observations to the table, they should be welcomed for the CRITICAL (pun intended) role they play in the process. ID has to reject the scientific method, science always looks for challenges to make the model more accurate -- but ID is by definition perfectly accurate already, and cannot be challenged.
I support everything the MMCC people want as an end result -- I'd like to see us embrace alternative energy, stop burning fossil fuels and generally be more conscious of the impact we have on the planet. I also think that there is a real harm being done to science when people with legitimate complaints about the SCIENCE of MMCC are treated as pariahs. Although I tend to think that MMCC is real, and there is certainly no harm in proceeding to curb our carbon emissions, I welcome the legimate claims of people who think that solar cycles are responsible, or that this period is not particularly warm on a geological chart of temperatures. These are legitimate scientific ideas based on observation and empirical data. MMCC as a theory will gain much more respect when it embraces challenges, instead of treating them in the same way ID treats challenges -- by throwing the scientific method under a bus. On the other hand, if the MMCC people do succeed in making challenges to their "science" become heresy, the ID people will be sure to take notes in how that happened.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I was about to say the exact same thing!
Any journalist who would delete one his/her paragraphs just because of pressure from some activist group doesn't deserve to have the job.
Since when is news reporting supposed to be about changing the facts to please special interest groups?
It's an unprovable theory (as unprovable as the existence of God). ID is not a theory - there is no evidence for it, it isn't testable and it isn't falsifiable.
And as for ID not being the same as creationism, would you like to explain this - http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/missing_link_cd.html
I was educated in a system that was left over from the socialists that ruled my country in the past.
I know that lots of people hated their guts, we did too, but one smart thing they did was - teach sound science in schools. There are some young religious groups emerging this last decade but they are all being laughed at just because people are well educated and know better than to believe nonsense.
Those ID folks trust the same source that said the earth was flat and the sun went around the moon. Just how many time does science need to prove the religious establishment and the bible wrong before it's clear to everybody that the good book is just an allegory at best and fairy tales at worst.
I am not saying that people shouldn't have faith of believe whatever they want to believe, but ask yourself if you want to have your sick child taken care of in a modern hospital by doctors that practice scientifically based medicine, or go to the church and light candles and prey that god takes care of it?
Religion is a white lie that helps people accept the difficulties in life, it makes them feel good for a moment, feel that they do have someone to turn to, no matter what they did or what they expect.
It helps them accept the problems, not solve them.
That's where reason, hard work and usualy science and proven knowledge comes in.
See this for some hot debunking action.
To briefly (and probably not completely accurately) summarize: 1) one guy did get fired, but that's because he wasn't getting published or graduating many students. Sorry you didn't perform. 2) a guy who said "I was fired" from the smithsonian wasn't actually fired (and was never employed there anyway), still has access to the collections and an office there, etc. They did move him to a different office, so the fact that he said "they changed the locks on my office" is true. Even worse, this is the guy who, in his last month as editor of a scientific journal (not because he was fired, but because his time was going to be up anyway) basically took it upon himself to wave a publication into print without peer review, saying that he was the only qualified editor, when there were others who could have and should have been able to review this paper.
So the ID advocates portrayed here seem to be acting in deceitful or unethical ways, and then this movie is compounding their deceit.
There are a lot of interesting questions still to be answered in evolutionary theory; rehashing the same battles over and over again with these people is a distraction at best.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
You're right! There's noise in the data! But can you show that the 'noise' rises to the level of statistical significance? Can you show that there's a recognizable chance that there's a 'signal' in that noise? I said that it fit a bell curve "very, very well" - I didn't say it fit "perfectly", because you don't get perfection in the real world.
The point is, despite a lot of people looking very very carefully, nobody's been able to show any statistically-significant deviation from random in mutations. That doesn't prove that such deviations don't exist, but it does justify a presumption of randomness until and unless someone can show something different. Feel free to get started - if you succeed, the Nobel Prize awaits.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Two points.
(a) All documentaries are propaganda. They are designed to present the film maker's view point of a situation. Objectivity does not exist in such works, since their purpose is to influence peoples thoughts.
(b) The major premise of Expelled is that scientific debate is squashed due to view point elitism. (I actually watched the movie) It does not matter what the debate is about, but when the stance is that 'you cannot oppose us', then there is a lot of problems. We see this in a lot of fields. Climate Change is a good example, but so is Health Care Management, Health Care Economics, and a plethora of many other fields. You can try this in the classroom. Challenge a professor on a topic that they are ideologically strong in, such as I did. I asked a Sociology professor ,who believed everything could be described in the Marxist Dialect, to describe the fall of the Berlin Wall in the Marxist Dialect. Her response was to scream at me and call me names. No discussion or debate, just hostile action. When I teach, I encourage debate and learning in the classroom. However, many of my fellow professors do not.
As a side point, I would recommend that you do not make assumptions on where people's viewpoints come from. It is a logical fallicy to assume that opinions that disagree with yours to be from the Bible. It is called a strawman arguement and is an invalid line of reasoning.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...
As Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer and other proponents of evolution appearing in Expelled have publicly remarked, the producers first arranged to interview them for a film that was to be called Crossroads, which was allegedly a documentary on "the intersection of science and religion." They were subsequently surprised to learn that they were appearing in Expelled, which "exposes the widespread persecution of scientists and educators who are pursuing legitimate, opposing scientific views to the reigning orthodoxy," to quote from the film's press kit.
To say those interviewed expected a 'completely different film' is a bit of a stretch--it's not like they thought they were doing voice-over work for the latest Pixar movie. But it is clear some interviewees were deceived.
The whole scientific process is an accumulation of knowledge over many generations. Because so much of our accumulated knowledge was established in the distant past, we need the process as a way to establish or maintain its viability as a part of the model of the world. Even when accumulation of knowledge spans a single lifetime, we still need the process in order to ensure we haven't gravitated to the answers we "like", but that we've actually come up with a sensible model for the world and that it has, so far, continued to be reliable.
How it works is we find a mystery in the world and attempt to explain it - then we attempt to work out, if that explanation really is true, then what else must also be true? And so we come up with tests... "If combustion is a process of release of Phlogiston, then there must be no material which gains weight as it burns" or "If our calculations about the orbital path of this planet is correct, then on this date at this time, the planet will be observed at this position." As test results come in, the results lend support to the theory, suggest the need for refinement, or else contradict it completely - in any case, so long as the process is properly followed and the results well documented, our total knowledge of the world has increased.
The reason why useful scientific ideas must be disprovable is because if they weren't, we would have no means of establishing the idea's reliability. You can use an untested idea to attempt to model the world in the hope that this model will provide you with some useful information - like playing a hunch, sometimes it does pay off - but to bring that idea to the point where you can rely upon it you must be able to test it.
The reason why I limited my answer to "in certain contexts" is this: I do not deny the value of discussion of creation in a philosophical context, only in a scientific one. Philosophy, like science, attempts to use logic to make reasoned assumptions about the world - but unlike science it does not limit itself to what can be measured or tested in physical terms. It is the proper venue for discussing the possibility of creation as the origin of life. Science deals with data, and the ongoing process of attempting to understand that data. As such, the assumptions made can't stray too far beyond the minimal assumptions possible from the data.
Creation theory and Intelligent Design are not only impossible to disprove (for the same reason it'd be impossible to disprove, for instance, the idea that we're in "The Matrix") but it's very difficult to base any meaningful understanding of the world upon them. Do you accept that the world was "created"? If so, how does that help you to understand how it was created? Intelligent Design claims that its idea could be a viable model for understanding biology - if one assumes things were "designed" then one can attempt to understand what the designer had in mind... But how can one hope to understand the thought processes of an unknown creator? And it's hard to see how that assumption could serve you better than the more conservative assumption that "there is some logical basis to how biology works" - and yet it can serve you worse, by leading you astray...
Bow-ties are cool.
Well you seem to be pretty sure of yourself. Here check for yourself what happens when a very, very solid study and the authors get into trouble when the data shows something other than the "scientific consensus".
Even the mighty House of Representatives condemned the study (a first in our modern and very scientific times). The data was solid, the methodology was stone hard and still, when talking to a bunch of retards it does not matter. Especially if the retards are SCIENTISTS. That is why i am very weary when it comes to "consensus".
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Pirsig has a great line in his novel which I paraphrase as "nobody screams and shouts that the sun will rise tomorrow", it's a given and there is no discussion. It seems to me that the people who are afraid of discussion are the screamers. If people argue that the world is flat there is no need to shout them down and freak out at them etc, if you _know_ something to be true you should not be offended or upset if someone else believes otherwise. If your knowledge (belief/faith) is in doubt perhaps then you would scream/shout/freak out. That is what I've taken from the trailer linked here, it totally reminded me of the fanaticism part of "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenence".
Cheers,
_GP_
Ben Stein's Expelled trailer presents itself as an advocate for free speech for academics who are being ostracized for their belief in, or even the slightest hint of, Intelligent Design. In that regard he free to say what he wants and I support his right to do so no matter how stupid what he or the others say is.
Of course I also have the freedom of speech to say what I want and what he says in his movie trailer and other video clips I've seen of him is, well to be kind, stupid.
As someone said, he misses the point that theology belongs in it's own space and not in the academic world of science.
As we all know, but not all like, science requires evidence. So while the "mud" might have gotten a kick start with lightening to produce fully functional 747's it's just a hypothesis at this point how lift got started. Once we can create life with mud and lightening in a lab ourselves we'll have definitive proof about one way that life can get started - there could be others, such as life starting in outer space in asteroids, possibly with the energy of a collision, or the warmth from the sun during a close flyby. In any event science considers these potential hypotheses that require evidence before they can be considered a potentially valid theory.
Ben Stein shows his preference, in fact he doesn't hide it at all, when he states that he used to believe in God at the beginning of his life. Well he still does believe in God although he doesn't directly say so. It's a media manipulation technique since he makes one consider the possibly that he changed his mind but then he never delivers on that and instead makes himself out to be a crusader for an injustice.
It is an injustice to call someone's (many someone's) ideas stupid? Should a stupid idea and the person who purveys them not be called what they are? Should the intelligent among the human species not call it like they see it? Isn't that an attempt by Ben Stein to prevent free speech?
Also, his use of the Richard Dawkin's quotes are likely taken out of context. They are effectively used to impune all scientists who communicate the lack Intelligent Design in Intelligent Design.
In his trailer Ben Stein makes the statement that Darwin is a dangerous idea however he doesn't follow through with what he means by that. Of course, to people like Ben Stein, Glenn Beck, Jerry Falwell, the Pope, and other god fearing people, Darwin's ideas are dangerous since the notions of evolution and natural selection might just leave them without any god - and that would destabilize their world view beyond their ability to function normally in everyday life. Oh wait, it sounds like it has as stupid is as stupid does.
Yes, Ben Stein, you can question the authority of Darwin's ideas all you want, however, don't go crying by making a whimpering movie about being expelled when those with some actual intelligence counter question the intelligence of your questions as well as their underlying premises. When the underlying premises of the so called "questions of Darwin's authority" is a supernatural notion such as God you'll have to answer questions yourself about the bigger holes supporting that hypothesis.
Here's a question for you Ben: who created your intelligent designer? Maybe the intelligent designer evolved from lightening stuck mud to create the entire universe where we find ourselves? If so where did the mud come from that created the designer?
For someone who claims that some ideas, such illegal immigration to the USA, are too complex for you (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHbdMbSLfb4) you've sure made up your mind about the first cause of God, something which has zero evidence for it. It seems to me that illegal immigration is a much simpler concept to solve by many orders of magnitude than how the universe got started assuming of course that it ever had a beginning. (A beginning to the universe might not make sense to us mere humans as time *may not* have existed before the universe began).
Stupid ideas are just th
Any example of how scientists "had it wrong" at one point in history implicitly provides support for the power of science to get things right. By citing such examples you are attempting to illustrate the failings of science by appealing to more accurate scientific knowledge--a logical contradiction. If science fails so easily, how has it produced the successes that illustrates the failure?
The power of science is not that scientists are individually superior humans. They are obviously subject to the same failings as anyone else. The power of science is that the system of group organization compensates and corrects over time for the failings of the individuals. Thus today we know that orbits are elliptical.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Crap, Greeks knew the Earth was round and could measure its circumference to within 10% (Eratosthenes). Scientists kept this knowledge alive, or tried to, unlike the Christians who liked to burn down libraries and people for that matter. There's a reason why the Christian dominated times were called The Dark Ages. It's the Bible where we get the phrase four corners of the Earth. I love how ignorant of history fundamentalists are. Or are you just stupid?
Let me get this first bit out of the way. I love science, and evolution works - heck, without an evolutionary nothing in my field of study (biology) makes any sense at all. So yeah, I'm biased. But I still would like to share my views on intelligent design, so I quit lurking as AC and made an account for this post.
Anyway, let's talk about irreducible complexity. These are supposed phenomena that have occurred in science (biology in these cases) that have caused some folks to say, "Well, I can't possibly imagine how that would have come about through evolution, so this must disprove evolution - Aha! A creator!" Time and time again such "irreducibly complex" structures have arisen (and later been reduced), so that most arguments now center around the difficulty evolution would have making the first cells. I mean that's it, we have mountains of evidence for evolution in everything else, so ID boils down to observing tiny, marvelously complex things and using those observations to support a Designer.
It's been discussed here already that such a stance on a discovery would necessarily end further inquiry, and as such is particularly detrimental to scientific investigation, but what does it say about the Designer? To me, this results in what I call a small god. So you believe in an all-powerful creator who set in motion the cosmos and caused the Earth to produce life, but early on this Designer got careless or lazy, and fudged a few of the details. How is that an attractive idea? You've got a Designer who set up the universe flawlessly - except for a little bit where his evolutionary process couldn't quite cut it making I don't know, flagella or something*, so he just stuck it in there himself and called it a day. I'd much rather believe in a creator who actually made everything run smoothly on its own, who had so much foresight and cleverness that all he had to do was configure an infinitely small point of matter properly, such that it exploded into the wonderful universe we have today. To me, this is a much more attractive, larger god than the one that produces irreducible complexities. And who knows, maybe the Big Bang itself isn't irreducibly complex, as I've represented it. But the point is that we won't know if we dismiss things as irreducible and preclude scientific inquiry.
Along with the lack of qualities that describe a good scientific theory, this small-minded approach lies at the heart of my problem with ID. Just because we know how the Earth works doesn't make it any less amazing - in fact, I would argue that it makes it even more impressive. I know how plate tectonics creates mountains, but mountains are still beautiful to behold, and I feel the same way about the infinite complexity of life.
Richard Dawkin's " Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda" is relevant.
The creationism / evolution debate has been done many times here on Slashdot. There'll be comments making one or more of the hundreds of old and refuted creationist arguments(1). It's possible that a couple of comments will use arguments even the Answers in Genesis creationist group says not to use(2). Someone will say there's no evidence for Macroevolution and someone else will point out 29 plus evidences for Macroevolution(3).
The point of Expelled is to make people think they've learned about the creation / ID / evolution debate, but to feel that Darwin= Holocaust. Note how they interview scientists of all sorts, but they don't interview academics who cover antisemitism in pre-20th century Europe. Even one hint or reminder that, say, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies in 1543 would ruin the Darwin -->Holocaust propoganda.
----------
(1) "evolution requires faith," "Piltdown," "Midocean magnetic anomalies are not reversals"...
(2) "there are no beneficial mutations," "no new species have ever been produced"...
(3) Even if there were no fossils, how to explain how biochemistry matches phylogeny? It's one thing to claim the designer re-uses code to explain similarity, but why would a designer reuse broken code?
You need to know Stein's background to see what he's after. Although a conservative, he's also an exceedingly intelligent iconoclast aiming to reveal problem behavior where it's typically not admitted.
His purpose in Expelled is not to promote creationism, either in and of itself or in comparison to evolution. His intention is to point out that SOME OF the scientific community is participating in the same sort of hair-on-fire hysteria as the most vocal creationists. While the latter are widely know and fairly expected to employ this as a tactic, or just emotionalism, the scientific community "should" be above it, but isn't.
He rightly shows that the "evolution/creationist debate" isn't. He shows that it is instead a construct. Creationists claim it in order to put their ideas on equal footing with science, and science unwittingly helps them when some of its members react to what they expect rather than what's actually being said. His movie is a case study in precisely this, both within itself and as a social phenomenon, and you can bet your ass this is exactly what he intended.
It's easy to poke holes in the highly vocal creationists' stance, and quite popular to do so. It's more difficult to poke holes in their scientific counterparts, and supremely unpopular if you assume his intention is to promote creationism. Promoting creationism is his tool, exposing intellectual bigotry is his intention, and before the movie even premiers, he is succeeding admirably.
If one isn't convinced, consider the fact that he's targeting only those that overreact to the situation. For the most part both religious and scientific adherents (and those who hold to both) coexist and even discuss their viewpoints without any acrimony or "debate". They see no contradiction because the two thought systems are orthagonal -- entirely independent and incomparable. It's those in science who can't grasp this due to perceived peer pressure or fear that overreact and so unwittingly lend credence to that which they oppose by the sheer act of opposing it.
And keep in mind that although the movie pokes at one side, that doesn't mean he considers the other side to be right. He's going after the one target too few have the balls to attack. My money says that when it's died down, he'll make a statement that he has no intention of supporting creationism, only that he intended to do what I've described above.
The movie is a masterful piece of agitprop (agitating propoganda). It gets its targets to react wildly to it as though it were their traditional perceived enemy, while its true intent to show that those targets are themselves reacting wildly when they, as the supposed intellectuals, should be reacting with due consideration, if at all. And at this point it doesn't matter if the movie even comes out; it's already done exactly what Stein wants it to.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Not to mention the optic nerve connects to the wrong side of the retina, producing a completely unnecessary blind spot at the center of vision. And what sort of "intelligent" designer puts a sewage outlet in the middle of a playground, I ask you?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Actually, the turtles hypothesis is more valid (from a scientific perspective) than Creationism. You see, you could launch satellites, confirm the spherical nature of the planet, and observe there is no turtle anywhere in sight - the theory is falsifiable.
Not so with creationism or its equally dubious cousin intelligent design. There is no way to demonstrate them to be false, making them deficient.
"SCIENCE is not about BELIEF" -- bullshit it isn't, it's a construct for understanding implemented by imperfect people; and people with sometimes imperfect information.
Science is about the persuit of truth through observation and testing. Religion is about persuit of truth through being told what the truth is. "Belief" is what parents mean when they say "because" in response to their children's questions of "why?" If science is "belief" then there is no truth. I "believe" that I am a person. I "believe" that there is a car parked in the garage. I can't "know" that there is a car in my garage because I'm not in the garage to observe it. Even if I was looking at it, my senses are flawed, so I have to "believe" them. When you use "belief" as you have, the word has no meaning. Or, more accurately, it has all meanings and everything is "belief." That makes a cute trick for attacking others, but for actually having a discussion makes it pretty much impossible.
Learn to love Alaska