Lawyer, economist and actor Ben Stein, creator and narrator of the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. (Premise Media)

Ben Stein’s is an American life. A brilliant student of both law and economics, he is the anti-Forrest Gump, having made his way through the highest level of Boomer-era America. He worked as a poverty lawyer, wrote speeches for Richard Nixon, filed syndicated columns for a host of big-name publications, won seven Emmys for his Comedy Central quiz show Win Ben Stein’s Money and starred as a deadly boring teacher in one of the most beloved films of the eighties, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. He is that rarest of creatures: an intellectual with a sense of humour.

Ben Stein has demonstrated that there is no ceiling in American life, no limit on how high the best and the brightest can rise. Currently, he is learning – just as his mentor Tricky Dick did – that there are no second chances. He has just released the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a strident plea for the acceptance of intelligent design theory, and a defence of those studying it. In questioning one of our bedrock scientific theories — and thus the tenets of social Darwinism, from which he has benefited — Stein appears to have taken a torch to his own remarkable career.

“Oh my gosh!” he said to me during a recent interview in a Toronto hotel room, “this has been a crazy ride.” Stein is far more animated in real life than his screen persona allows. In our meeting, he comes across as an avuncular mensch, rumpled in his suit and signature trainers. “I can’t believe the reaction I’ve got to this film. People are angry – so angry that I’m not sure I’d make the film now if I knew how it would be.”

The film is essentially a road movie, in which Stein travels the globe searching out proponents and detractors of intelligent design (ID), which the press materials define as “simply an effort to empirically detect whether the ‘apparent design’ in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design, or is simply the product of an undirected process.” We get to meet a host of establishment scientists and anti-deists, with special opprobrium paid to Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. (“Bit of a reptile,” according to one ID apologist quoted in the film.) We are shown, in no uncertain terms, how vilified and horsewhipped are those members of academe who dare to suggest that there is a guiding hand behind all life. Debate has been stifled, the film suggests, and the Darwinists have won. (Survival of the toughest theory, perhaps?)

Stein, right, discusses the theory of intelligent design with Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. (Premise Media)

At least since his appearance in Ferris Bueller, he has become the embodiment – indeed a parody – of latter-day American technocratic rationalism. Why on earth would he go in for this intelligent design stuff? One supposes that there are ways in which to question the scientific inviolability of Darwinist theory; after all, it has been one and a half centuries since Darwin posited natural selection. As Stein put it to me: “If Galileo and Newton hadn’t questioned the science of their day, where would we be now?”

To the uninitiated, ID seems to be a way of returning to the very thinking that Galileo and Newton had to battle: it infuses science with the spiritual. But Stein doesn’t see a problem with this. “Newton never renounced the idea of God. He said that God made the rules, and he explained them. So what’s the problem with science and God now?”

The mainstream scientific community doesn’t entertain the idea of a grand designer because the burden of proof – as in all scientific positions – falls upon the claimant, and the Creator has been remarkably coy about revealing Him- or Herself to the folks in lab coats. Expelled seems uninterested in approaching the argument in a way that does any justice to the rigours of intellectual, let alone scientific discourse. Stein, we learn very early in the film, wants us to get emotional.

Expelled proves that there is no subject that the modern documentary can’t dumb down. The most shameful trait is the use of found footage removed from all context, which gives many of them the air of propaganda – a charge that has been thrown at Expelled, and rightly so. (Expelled was nominally directed by Nathan Frankowski, but the film’s intelligent design is Ben Stein’s all the way.) With the use of historical footage — particularly extensive scenes of the building of the Berlin Wall — the opening section of Expelled takes its cues from the Michael Moore playbook, and goes further in establishing metaphors and connections that have no relevance to the argument at hand.

The Berlin Wall was meant to stand in for the dividing line between two ideologies – communism and the openness of the West. But the Wall here is a metaphor for the divide in the scientific community between what can and cannot be discussed. And here is where things become immediately fuzzy. Is Stein suggesting that in discarding intelligent design theory, the scientific establishment is a bunch of godless pinkos?

Stein, right, confronts a statue of naturalist Charles Darwin, who posited evolution by natural selection. (Premise Media)

Well, yes, it seems that he is. As Stein’s deadpan narration reminds us, America is a “dream of freedom and equality. Imagine if these freedoms were taken away. What would we lose?” We are reminded of precisely what we would lose: we see images of the Stars and Stripes wavering in a Washington breeze, sunset over the Potomac River, the White House catching the light of the gloaming. Goodbye America as we know it.

It doesn’t take long to realize that Stein’s aims are broader than a mere defence of those probing the origins of life. Stein believes that Darwinism is to blame for God being shut out of the classroom, exorcised from scientific discourse, banished from American life. “Why,” he asked me when we spoke, “can we not have a discussion about these things with our children in school?”

The answer seems to be beside the point. The second half of Expelled is a lugubrious dirge in which we are taken down the road that Darwinism has supposedly paved for us: Nazi death camps and eugenics facilities. These scenes are some of the most risible you’ll see at a Cineplex this year. While Mein Kampf and other intellectual pillars of Nazism certainly include chunks of what could be considered evolutionary theory, Stein fails to mention how specifically Nazism is linked to the sense of exceptionalism that exists in so much German epic poetry, music and intellectual reasoning, and also the very specific social circumstances that existed in Germany post-First World War.

“Was Hitler insane?” Stein asks several of his subjects in the film, who are no doubt qualified to make a pronouncement on the mental health of the long dead Fuhrer; these “experts” insist he was no madder than you or I. Stein wants us to understand that Hitler’s social Darwinism was rational, scientific even. It’s just that it was bad science.

The film implies that a society embracing the notions of Darwinism, natural selection and evolutionary principles without celestial input would be brutal, ice cold, even murderous. (Insert abortion and euthanasia debates here.) But is a scientific theory ever meant as a guiding social principle? Besides, universal health care and the welfare state are ways to keep the weak alive and kicking. How does Stein square these two seemingly oppositional concepts?

He doesn’t.

“I just wanted to make a film that opened up the debate, that said, ‘We don’t have all the answers yet, let’s talk about this stuff.’” What he made was a strident polemic that further politicizes science and muddies the petri dish.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed opens across Canada on June 27.

Richard Poplak is a writer based in Toronto.