Bob Strimple Reviews "Expelled"

Bob Strimple was President of WSC when I was a student there in the mid-80s. He was the first professor of Systematic Theology and he is now President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology. He is the author of The Modern Search for the Real Jesus. You can download his Systematic Theology lectures for $2.00 a pop and trust me, they’re worth infinitely more than that! (the link above is only to the course we knew as “Holy Spirit” i.e. the application of redemption). The rest are here. Recently Bob went to see the documentary, Expelled. Here is his review:

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I went Saturday afternoon and offer this quick thumbnail review:

1) Greatest strength: revealing just how total is the monopoly held by atheists/agnostics on the academic science community in the USA today-scary!

2) Greatest, surprising weakness: while noting that the opponents of Intelligent Design theory brush it off as teaching simply that “life is complex, so there must be a God,” the documentary NEVER offers even a brief presentation of what the Intelligent Design theory actually teaches, what evidence it offers that point to an Intelligent Designer! For that the viewer must read a book like Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, but the film never points the viewer to that book or any other presenting Intelligent Design thought. For my money this was a surprising and fatal flaw.

3) Amazing admission by contemporary atheists-one that Ben Stein brings out in the documentary but doesn’t make nearly enough of (in my opinion): Early in “Expelled” it is noted, without comment, that Francis Crick, probably the most highly respected contemporary atheist scientist, when asked how the first living cell (far more complex than Darwin ever dreamed) came to appear on earth, offers the theory that that cell was “seeded” on this planet by highly evolved beings from another planet. Near the end of the film, when Stein asks Richard Dawkins (author of the popular book, “The God Delusion”) the same question about how life began on earth, Dawkins answers that “one popular contemporary theory”-and the only one he mentions-is this business about living cells being seeded by highly evolved aliens from another planet. In my opinion Stein should have “leaped on” Dawkins at that point to ask him whether he realized that he had just admitted the very point that Intelligent Design theory is at such pains to make-and which atheists like Crick and Dawkins deny with such derision; i.e., the need for a Designer!!! Dawkins had just “given away the store” (to use the technical expression in logic). He may want to quickly point out, and does point out that his proposed Designer was not a supernatural being; but his theory, of course, only raises the question of where the living cell that eventually evolved into this intelligent alien being came from, which will raise the question of where THAT living cell came from, and so on in an infinite regress of questions unless at some point the Divine Creator is recognized. The suggestion that the Intelligent Designer was the Creator God is literally laughed off by the many atheist scientists interviewed in the film, but the Crick interplanetary “seeder” hypothesis is offered with a perfectly straight face! “Expelled” is worth seeing. See it if you can. But it should have been better.

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One comment

  1. Scott
    One of the most memorable courses I had during my PhD program at WTS was Strimple’s class on Roman Catholicism. Bob’s extensive knowledge of the history of the events that led up to Vatican II and all the particular players-especially the role of Cardinal Ratzsinger-the present pope- were masterfully handled.

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