Phil Cooke

"Expelled" Opens Today

The movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” opens tonight across the country, and I’d encourage you to see it.  Kathleen and I were invited to a preview of the new movie featuring Ben Stein here in Hollywood. It’s a 90 minute feature documentary, that’s creative, fascinating, and very compelling. In spite of what you might have heard, it’s not really a pro-Intelligent Design project, it’s really about freedom of speech in America. Featuring highly regarded researchers and professors from major institutions who have been fired or dismissed because they’ve written or done research about the issue, it simply asks the question, “Why is it so forbidden in academia to even discuss the possibility of Intelligent Design?”

It also looks at what appears to be a significant political effort to stop funding for ID research. Regardless of what you think about the concept of Intelligent Design, the film asks important questions. It also discusses the legacy of Darwinism, and the slippery slope that line of thought has lead throughout the last 100 years.

The producers did an excellent job of interviewing “the leading lights” of evolutionary theory, like Richard Dawkins, and in a remarkable turn of events, gets Dawkins to actually admit there might be a designer.

I think one of the most compelling issues around the release of the movie is the incredible anger that’s been generated from the evolutionary proponents of the argument. There are a multitude of blogs and magazine articles attempting to discredit the movie, and of all people – Richard Dawkins even snuck into a private Minneapolis screening of the film. He signed in with the name “Clinton Dawkins.” Later, he tried to deny it, but Paul Lauer, the film’s publicist, told me last night he actually has the sign in sheet Dawkins signed to get in to the film.

So the highly charged reaction to the film tells me there’s something to this. After all, if Ben Stein and the producers were just fringe nuts, why would the other side be trying so hard to silence the film?

You’ll find out when you view the movie.

This is an important film. As I said before – regardless of your position on the issue, the producers look at freedom of speech, and how that freedom is being walled in and closed off is both frightening and alarming.

If you have a church group, school or civic group, or just a bunch of friends, I would strongly urge you to buy block tickets and take your friends, family, and large groups to see the movie. It opens nationwide April 18th.

As I’ve said before, studios and distributors make the decision on how long a movie stays in theaters based on the opening weekend box office. That’s why you should make plans now to see it the weekend of April 18th

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.