Apologize Now, Ben Stein!

Dear Ben Stein:

On behalf of the undersigned, we demand that you withdraw from your slanderous attack on science and issue an apology for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed as well as your statements about science that include the vile assertion that, "science leads to killing people."

We would love to believe that your attack comes from ignorance but reality shows us that this cannot be the case.  You are an economist, you worked for a President, and you are well known as one of the most intelligent men in the nation.  You are the man who challenged people to Win Ben Stein's Money through a contest of wits which you rarely lost.  As host of America's Most Smartest Model, you insult models by using words they are either unwilling or incapable of understanding.  Clearly, you cannot be ignorant.  Why you would choose to demonize science and scientists is something which we cannot understand.

In Expelled and in recent television appearances you have explicitly blamed Darwin's Theory of Evolution through Natural Selection for a host of atrocities, including the Holocaust and Stalin's massacres.  Rather than endlessly expostulate the anger which we feel toward you right now, we will instead quote a voice of reason, the late Jacob Bronowski, concerning Auschwitz and the Holocaust:

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers.  That's false--tragically false.  Look for yourself.  This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz.  This is where people were turned into numbers.  Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people.  And that was not done by gas.  It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.  When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

Mr. Stein, science is merely the best tool with which we may attempt to learn about reality and improve the lives of others.  Science is not, and does not seek to fill the role of, religion.  Those who seek to use it as such do so without the approval of science and are not conducting science.  Scientists can not be blamed for the way the leaders of the world choose to use the knowledge with which they have provided the world.  Religious leaders, on the other hand, have repeatedly failed, for thousands of years, to live up to their vaunted morality and have allowed pogroms, crusades, and witch burnings to go unchecked.

Science has, on the whole, greatly improved the lives of the people on this planet, and without attempting to impose false morality on humanity.  Without science we would all, for the most part, die before the age of two.  If we survived past that age, we could look forward to an average life span of perhaps twenty-five or thirty years.  We would have none of the comforts and technologies which we all have inherited.  We fail to see how you can state that "science leads to killing people" when the overwhelming evidence shows that science has, on the whole, vastly improved the human condition.

Expelled's arguments are based entirely on lies, deceptions, trickery, and misrepresentation.  Expelled is a smear campaign that fails to even define the supposed science behind Intelligent Design.  The information debunking your claims is readily available for all to see and Expelled fails to stand under scrutiny.

By attempting to demonize science, you have slandered scientists, science enthusiasts, skeptics, and anyone who accepts that science is a legitimate tool for humanity to attempt to learn about our world.  What is worse, you connect us with some of the worst atrocities in human history, which is not merely insulting and slanderous, it is sick, disgusting, and reprehensible.  Shame on you Mr. Stein.

As an after thought, Expelled claims that ID theorists are not being allowed to practice their so-called science in academia.  Since "science leads to killing people," as you so eloquently put it, perhaps your ID colleagues should be thankful that they aren't really scientists.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned, Members of the Central Valley Skeptics, and other concerned citizens.