This is from a conversation I’ve been having with an acquaintance, who is a well known theology professor, about the Jeff Schloss review of Expelled:
Yes, I know a bit about the ISU situation as well, and I agree that Schloss is too soft on ISU, and that he misses some important nuances about the first amendment and academic freedom. Even among my friends in the American Scientific Affiliation, I’ve always argued that the Gonzalez case was an injustice and that his “ID” book is something most Christians can appreciate, whatever their view of “hardcore” ID or creationism.
But this is what troubles me, about this film and many other things: I’m not sure the evangelical movement in the U.S. ever really climbed out of fundamentalism in many ways. Carl Henry’s “Uneasy Conscience” and Francis Schaeffer’s work got evangelicals to engage culture, but in large part the engagement has been a hostile culture war. I think Mark Noll is right and that this posture led to a “scandal of the evangelical mind” in many fields, including two fields in which I have an overlapping scholarly interest: law and the sciences. I’m glad that in recent years there has been more much productive and transformative engagement by evangelicals in many fields, including law and policy (I think of the “For the Good of the Nation” document produced by the National Association of Evangelicals, for example). However, I think the sciences remain an area of high hostility.
The Expelled movied tries to make the case that this hostility is due to enforcement of “Darwinist” orthodoxy. As Jeff Schloss points out in his review, that is true in many quarters, but on the other hand there is a log in our own eye as well. At the end of the day, denying the evidence for common descent is akin to denying that the earth travels around the sun — as even Mike Behe recognizes. I really passionately believe that to become transformers of culture, we evangelicals need to become more creative theologically and apologetically around the reality of common descent. The political ID movement behind Expelled reinforces the “wall” mentality that disallows any constructive engagement between evangelical faith and created reality, IMHO. Talk about “expelled” — I’ve been demonized by some brothers in Christ for even suggesting that we look at the evidence for common descent objectively and try to address it constructively. Somehow this perpetual posture of defensiveness has to change, I think.