Ex-spelled Out, for those who are confused…

This will be the first of a series of brief attempts to address the stunning ignorance of Ben Stein. It would take a series of books, not blogs, to cover his film “Expelled: no intelligence allowed,” but I have chosen one of the many interviews he has given. It has been posted on YouTube in three parts, the first here:

First verbal bowel movement:
Ben complains that people generally don't know what "Intelligent Design" is. We do know what it means, it's in the title. I'm happy to hear that he accepts it is only a hypothesis. If he paid attention in elementary science classes, he should understand that a hypothesis is just an idea. It has no value until experimentation proves it right. Then the results may be published and hundreds of other scientists may do their own tests to confirm that it is true. After long consideration and considerable evidence, the scientific community may raise a hypothesis to a theory. Intelligent design is indeed a hypothesis, but you can hypothesize about anything.
Unfortunately, he knows everything about ID and nothing about Evolution. He makes this point very clear by saying that "we didn't just originate as human beings from lighning striking a mud puddle," as if that is stated anywhere in the theory. This is a classic example of terrible intellectual argumentation, known in philosophy as a straw-man. He can't argue with the real theory, so he makes up bullshit and calls it his opponent. And to address the statement that existence of God and the beginning of life is a philosophical issue, philosophy runs on the scientific method, requiring logic and reasoning.
All facts are based on theories. Get used to it. A scientific theory carries more weight than what the common connotation makes people think (like a conspiracy theory), but that's irrelavent. Evolution is a theory that explains how the complex life forms we see today came into existence, after the more simple creatures that are found in ancient fossils. It explains why we find bizarre skeletons buried deep in the ground, dated millions of years old. "Intelligent Design" is simply a rebranding of Creationism that says "God did it." As far as I can see, a deist approach of a creator lighting the spark and letting nature take its course does not interfere with the theory of Evolution. It's not an ideology, it's just one peice of the puzzle that scientists work very hard to solve.
However, the problem that scientists tend to have with an "intelligent designer" is that it creates a bigger problem than it solves. It's completely irrational to say that "we don't know what sparked life on Earth, so it obviously had to be God." Burning witches didn't prevent disease, and believing in creation stories will only be another tether to our barbaric past.