The comments weren’t working when I tried this in April, so now that they are, I’m trying again.

I love the reviews from the three of you, and use them regularly to determine what movies I want to see. More so than any other group of reviewers, I find I can trust your judgment on what to watch.

Thus I was disappointed to hear the take on Expelled, something I know something about, as a former biology teacher who had to leave his position because the school began teaching mandatory classes in Intelligent Design.

Sadly, what the Discovery Institute has done in the public lexicon is mix up the terms “intelligent design” and “Intelligent Design”. While the former notion has been around for a hundred years, and indeed much longer- that God is intelligent and made the universe and all that is in it- the latter is a particular hypothesis that denies evolution and states that God at some point snapped his fingers and creatures popped into existence, throughout history.

I don’t think Michael Moore is perfect, but compared to Expelled, he takes no liberties with facts at all. The directors of Expelled ignored the many cases of people who’ve lost their jobs for insisting on teaching evolution, as well as all those Christian scientists who support evolution, and instead presented the small minority of biologists who don’t, as well as a series of cases of people who lost their jobs for opposing evolution. Except it turns out, in every single one of those cases, the individual did not actually lose their job, or didn’t lose it for opposing evolution. The directors frankly lied.

I should say, those of us who support evolution, don’t like the term Darwininsts. It implies that it is some sort of religion, and thus has been used by the Literal Creationists and IDists as a term of derision. Likewise, it was far more than the radical atheists who were against this film. It included men and women of science, of many faiths and no faiths.

I am really sorry, Jeff, that you received such an attack for your email. It seems like you stepped into a landmine controversy that you weren’t aware of before this.

But I appreciate your pointing out the problem with aligning evolution with the Nazis, or indeed eugenics at all, if one is attempting to engage in dialogue and not rancor.