The Evolution of Snobbery

Roger Ebert recently reviewed the Ben Stein film Expelled. You can read Roger's review here.

Some of my friends have been talking about how Roger doesn't 'understand' Intelligent Design or Creationism. Personally, I think he understands these views well enough. The problem is the snobbery he reviews them with.

This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

Often times film critics like to find the most colorful ways to put down a film. I wonder if it is an unspoken way that critics rank each other (certainly Robert Ebert is the king). In any case, any venue can go bad when it is overly colorful, and I find this critique (as his others) goes far over the line.

If a critic wants to say he doesn't like a movie, he is always entitled to his opinion. I would prefer it if he could articulate which elements he does not like, but if he wants to say that the movie is an unlikable movie -he really has far exceeded his say. This is the origin of snobbery.

Take some of Roger's claims here:

[His film] ... draws unwarranted conclusions ...

Isn't this just a snobby way of saying you didn't agree with the conclusions?

Roger is not content to voice his opinion as an individual, so he increases his scope to say -not only does he not agree with the conclusions- these conclusions are totally impossible to agree with no matter who you are.

Roger Ebert makes the accusation that Ben Stein leaves out that he has religious beliefs. That seems like a valid criticism to me (although not in the scoffing way Ebert says it). On the other hand, Roger Ebert is not up front about what his pressupositions are.

In some ways the film and the critique from Ebert suffer from the same problem: neither side is owning up to what they believe because they consider their opinions in themselves to be petty, trivial, and meaningless.

The scary thing about this that if you don't take your own opinions seriously, your opinions are not serious opinions. Both men are lacking in their ability to fess up to the fact that they have made interpretations.

The problem isn't just with film-reviewers who hide their closet secular agenda.

Personally, I am hard pressed to say who wields more snootiness: film critics or darwinsists. Expelled makes reference of this as well.

One of the people interviewed by Stein (who if I am not mistaken is something of an ally of Richard Dawkins) notes that Dawkins is a slimy lizard. The snobbiness of secular scientists is so vast, it is hard for their own side not to see it.

Again, the origin of the snobbiness is the insistence on forming opinions for other people. Evolutions insist their interpretations are not, in fact interpretations at all. They are 'conclusions'.

Even though Darwinists have never been able to prove their findings (and there really is no way to do it), they still proclaim it as (and fight to claim) that evolution is a fact. If you want to see an example of how snotty these scientists are, check out this so-called encyclopedia article on Evolution as Fact.

Wikipedia praises Darwin as the man who "realized" the "fact of evolution". The snowball really began rolling down the hill as soon as Wikipedia first started claiming to have a 'neutral', non-point of view perspective (by the way, another way to describe the condition of having a non-point of view is "blindness").

The problem is not that secularists are incorrect (and I believe they are very, very incorrect). The true problem is these people believe they know everything, and their pretentions have led them to abuse their roles as scientists to soapbox for their opinions.

At the same time, these men are really cowards in that they are too ashamed of their opinions to own up to them. This is why Jesus insisted that people answer for themselves when he asked them who he was.

From the perspective of mere devotion, it must be noted that as soon as someone becomes snobby about a subject, it means they do not love that subject.

For example, there are a lot of people who call themselves 'wine experts', (surely they must know everything about wine!). They always appeal to their laundry lists of rules about what foods go with what wines, which areas grow the best grapes (Can you imagine that? To claim that some places in the world have better wine because they were grown in a certain place? I have never been able to taste a difference like that; I don't mind it if that makes me unsuitably cultured).

If a person really loved wine, they wouldn't call themselves wine experts. They would call themselves wine lovers. But how many people call themselves wine lovers? People would think they were a bunch of drunkards putting on a show of their education and refinery, which is exactly what wine snobs are. They are ashamed, so they call themselves wine experts.

There are also experts in the fields of money laundering, kidnapping, terrorism, extortion, and -I might add- science.

And that brings us back to the theory of evolution: the scientists who profess evolution never love it, or talk as if they love it. The ones I have seen (like Richard Dawkins) talk like it is immaterial whether they even like the theory or not ... this is done to hide their biases, but also because they do not really care for their theory.

From a strictly scientific approach, it is irrelevant whether an examiner loves his theory or not, and that is why the strictly scientific approach fails to explain life. It is ignores (or pretends to ignore) the prefernces and love of the individual. It is totally detached from a person's inner values.

From the authority of the Word of God we are not to take up the mockery and scoffing of the film critics, and we are not to live by sight (as the scientists do). We must remember that it is very easy to see how unhappy these people are. They win their university fellowships (sometimes), but their whole lives are just for show. The truth is their lives have become a burden for them, and that is why the talk about everything in such a disinterested, uncaring way.

We are instead to take full responsibility for our opinions. We should daily examine the things we love, and ask ourselves how zealous we are about valuing those things. This is the path that leads to happiness. This is the perspective of mere devotion.