Expelled: Ben Stein’s “Smart New Ideas” ?

In honor of the premier of Expelled, Ben Stein’s film about the exclusion of intelligent design/creationism from school curricula, I offer these snippets to support his argument that fresh ideas that conflict with evolutionary theory are excluded from the classroom:

“Sow evolution as taught by Darwin and [Herbert] Spencer and you reap Nietzche, [Heinrich von] Treitzchke, and [Friedrich von] Bernhardi, and then you reap the present way, with its cruelty, its lust, its murder, its rape, its agony, its death and almost universal dissolution and hell” (Torrey 10-11). [1]

On Evolutionary Theory:

After many years’ investigation of the philosophy of evolution, an investigation carried on in full sympathy with the widest application of that captivating theory, I have yet to see proof of a single fact showing, or tending to show, the operation of the so-called “law” or “principle” of evolution in the world of Nature. No instance has ever been found of a living thing of one species coming from ancestors of another species; and there is not the slightest ground for the belief that such a thing ever happened (Mauro 45). [2]

Aside: part of Mauro’s doubt about the theory of evolution stems from his belief that "[i]f the Bible does not give us a truthful account of the events of the six days recorded in its first chapter, it is not to be trusted in any of its statements " (27).

Some Middle Ground on the Six Days (perhaps):

Does science, then, really, contradict Genesis I.? [. . .]Here certainly is no detailed description of the process of the formation of the earth in terms anticipative of modern science—terms which would have been unintelligible to the original readers—but a sublime picture, true to the order of nature, as it is to the broad facts even of geological succession [. . . .] The “six days” may remain as a difficulty to some, but if this is not part of the symbolic setting of the picture—a great divine “week” of work—one may well ask, as was done by Augustine long before geology was thought of, what kind of “days” these were which rolled their course before the sun, with its twenty-four hours of diurnal measurement, was appointed to that end? There is no violence done to the narrative in substituting in thought “aeonic” days—vast cosmic periods—for “days” in our narrower, sun-measured scale. The the last trace of apparent "conflict" disappears (101). [3]

Although Stein’s premise in the film is that academia prevents the airing of “smart new ideas” on the complex origins of the universe, please note that all of the above, which echo throughout Expelled, were written prior to 1920. Items one and two, especially, remain the primary objections to the theory of evolution. Apparently, some doctrines simply don’t, well, evolve.

1) Reuben Torrey. “What the War Teaches, or, The Greatest Lesson of 1917.” LA: Bible Institute of LA, 1918.
2) Philip Mauro. “Life in the Word.” The Fundamentals. Vol. 5. LA: Bible Institute of LA, 1917.
3) James Orr, “Science and the Christian Faith.” The Fundamentals. Vol.4. LA: Bible Institute of LA, 1917.