As Ben Stein’s new documentary film "Expelled" is lighting up movie theaters in the United States, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Academic Excellence and Research Committee has just voted down a proposal for a certificate of authority to offer a Master of Science degree in Science Education by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) Graduate School,based on a recommendation by Texas Commissioner of Higher Education, Dr. Raymund Paredes.
According to Stein, his motivation for producing the film that questions many public schools’ banning of the teaching of Intelligent Design evolutionary theory alongside that of Darwin’s is that, as he and many others, especially "Bible Belters" and religious Conservatives, see it, "Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way. Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s anti-the whole concept of learning."
However, many other Americans are equally adamant that there is not enough science underpinning the ID concept and they see it as a mask for a hidden agenda to promote a Judeo-Christian religious concept through the public school educational system: something which would violate the Constitutional separation of church and state.
Many "unbelievers" fear that what so often comes down to a "Science vs. Faith" polarizing duel is heating up to unhealthy extremes, and not just in the United States but throughout the world of Western European culture. There have already been violent incidences ignited by high feelings.
One of the thorns in the side of the "unbelievers", whether or not outside of their scientific inquiries they consdier themselves to be religious or not, is Creationist preacher Ken Ham, who asserts unequivocally that Darwinian evolutionary theory is a disguise for white racism. Ham and his followers base their agrument on the fact that, in the wake of his first book published in 1859, Darwin’s English Victorian society adopted what is now seen clearly to be a distortion of Darwin’s then-new evolutionary theory, a philosophical concept that came to be known as "social Darwinism".
"Social Darwinism" said that people who were wealthier were simply more evolved than people who were unfortunate and poor and thus everyone was in their "right place". In addition, many Western Europeans, who already saw their society as the pinnacle of human civilization, took Darwin’s book to mean that they were inherently superior to the non-white races of the world and thus were justified in ruling over them as they saw fit.
Unfortunately for Ham, there is nothing at all that documents that Darwin, who clearly did oppose slavery and who abandoned the Christianity that he felt endorsed slavery, was part of the twisting of his own concepts.
Ham has become an icon to "unbelievers" of how the believers in Intelligent Design think–or don’t think.
For their part, scientists who accept ID point to the militant, religion-deriding atheism of noted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as typifying an "unscientific attitude" toward the consideration of ID.