Ben Stein is a complete and utter douchebag.

Oh, Ben Stein. How I miss the glory days when your monotone delivery added humor to movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Visine Commercials. When you had a television show that just involved you outsmarting contestants who attempted to get “your money”. These things did so well to make everyone forget that you were Nixon’s speechwriter and accused Bob Woodward of inventing Deep Throat just to make Nixon look bad.

By and large, Stein’s comedic delivery channeled through a Stephen Wright monotone with that aura of “I’m totally smarter than you” made it so no one remembered that, in your actual substantive career, you weren’t the most admirable character.

Fortunately, Stein decided to remind everyone with his creation of “Expelled”. I’m not linking to it because I’m not going to promote it in any way shape or form.

Now, I’m not a scientist by trade. I have a more than passing interest in science and always have, I read Dawkins and pay attention to scientific advancements and generally keep up on things. But when it comes to the really deep stuff, I leave that to the experts. So whenever you’re done here, please peruse this series by Scientific American to understand just what’s wrong with Intelligent Design from a biologist’s perspective.

My point, though, is to take that famed and loved internet blogger tactic and tear into something without having seen it. For the record, the only way I will see this movie is if I can sneak into it or someone hands me a bootlegged copy. I won’t accept a free ticket, because I don’t want my presence in the theater contributing a single dollar to this pile.

Moving along. I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong when in watching interviews and reading up on Expelled, the scope and purpose of the movie seemed suspect. From the IMDB profile (so I’m assuming it’s the “official” tagline): Big science has expelled smart new ideas from the classroom…What they forgot is that every generation has its Rebel! The website also has a blog which leads off with a quote from an atheist bashing the movie despite not seeing it, much as I’m doing.

This is how we know Ben Stein’s motives have almost nothing to do with actually putting evolution and Intelligent Design on opposite sides of a boxing ring and letting them duke it out. Stein has crafted his movie to focus on nothing but the “persecution” of ID, as though “Big Science” were this big monolith that is resisting the legitimate studies and findings of ID and courageous Ben Stein is coming to the rescue.

And let me say: Ben is right. He is 100% correct. The scientific community has no tolerance for Intelligent Design, and for a good reason. It is not good science.

ID is not science, because it bases itself on the concept of “we don’t know, therefore…” Since evolution (Stein has unceasingly called it “Darwinism” despite the fact that no scientists call it that) is not 100% perfect or have answers for absolutely every question that could possibly be brought to it at this point… it’s wrong! Toss in a “designer” and bang, all done. How’d it get there? Designer. Why does it look like that? Designer.

ID makes no predictions, has no models, is based on no evidence. It is a “science” that has come about from considering unanswered questions “bad”. There is no actual science to ID, there is no involved theory, nor have there been any testing of a hypothesis because, by nature, it cannot be tested.

Ben’s defense of this bunk is nicely shot down with one observation by Scientific American: he never gets into the science of ID.

Stein doesn’t explain why ID makes more sense, and that’s a good thing. If he did that, the movie would collapse on itself. There’s no way to make a scientific comparison between evolution and ID because one is the result of a century or so of scientific rigor, the other is based on attempting to make creationism sound less stupid.

To put it simply, evolution is based on discoveries; ID is based on a lack of discoveries. Outside of “finding” the “designer” there is literally no way to “prove” anything was designed. That’s why their biggest argument isn’t evidence of design empirically, but rather an appeal that the complexity is too much for the average person to see as anything but design. It relies on ignorance.

Ignorance which Stein is preying upon by presenting ID as the poor, repressed underdog, not allowed into the room of scientific debate and education because scientists are mean and elitist. Not because it has no merits, because it has no reason TO be taught as science, no. ID is perfectly legitimate.

I could easily make a movie explaining how terribly alchemy is shunned from Big Science, I could find cranks and kooks who love alchemy and think it’s legitimate and present it in the same way, but it wouldn’t be able to escape the obvious: science doesn’t embrace it because it’s crap.

Ben Stein is trying to force established science to lower itself to the designation of “unproven idea”, and elevate ID to “legitimate theory”, when the former is more than that and latter is far less. If he succeeds, he will succeed only in damaging our scientific advancement even more than has already been done.

The United States ranks frighteningly low in accepting evolution as legitimate science, and this isn’t helping. The world is laughing at us, Ben Stein, and you are wearing our ignorance on a banner and trying to rally people beneath it.