Science and faith are in a battle, we are told, and those who stand on the side of reason and academic maturity side with the scientists, while those who stand on the side of irrationality and religious superstition side with the faith-based lunatics.  The elites in secular academia do not prove this, but they assert it - repeatedly.  It is one of the large disconnects separating the ivory tower from the mainstream of American culture: the vast majority of Americans believe in something transcendent, and do not feel it fair or appropriate to be condescended to by elites who have suddenly taken to rejecting millennia-old beliefs and values.  Well, I agree with the mainstream of America here, and it is one of the large reasons I do not take seriously the large increase in "popular atheism" as of late, evidenced by best-selling books from Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins.  While I am always concerned that people could be led astray by the self-serving propagandizing dogma of secular rationalists like this unholy trinity, the truth is that I am fully confident that there will never, ever be a time in American culture that we vastly repudiate the transcendent truths of a divine being.  But with that said, there is a crucial battle taking place, and it is not over my right to be a faith-based nut in vs. their right to be academic stalwarts.  The battle is over the fact that these people - the ivory tower culture of atheism and secularism in America - is an academic fraud, a scientific failure, and a phony.  And Ben Stein's brilliant new documentary exposes the emperor as the naked beast that it is ...
 
I have yet to come into contact with a critic of intelligent design that can explain why dialogue with proponents of such are not worthy of an invitation to the conversation.  They usually have so much foam coming out of their mouths that I can not even understand what they are saying.  Their objective is not mature conversation, and it certainly is not scientific inquiry, because the foundations of such require objectivity, open-mindedness, and a repudiation of academic censorship and bullying.  Sadly, the defining characteristics of those guarding the academic walls are the opposite - they refuse to engage the massive and overwhelming scientific case for intelligent design, and they discard of anyone who represents a threat to their system.  In the meantime, the public schools continue teaching their Darwinian drivel, and grown-up people continue to exit a life of such indoctrination with the perfectly coherent ability to see that the human reproductive system did not come from a cellular malfunction, and that the beauty of the world was not something to happen accidentally.  So in one sense, the faith-based folks like me who have absolutely do no doubt that life and the world have their origins in a divine being really have little to be afraid of.  I can not see a time coming when people will ever have enough faith to really be atheists.  Yes, it takes a great deal of effort to have the obedient faith that the Christian religion speaks of, but in a pure metaphysical sense, does anyone really believe it is easier to believe that a single cell explosion created the world eco-system than it is to have faith in a transcendent being?  Please.  However, the blackballers and ACLU hypocrites should not be let off the hook just because their agenda is so miserably failing in this postmodern culture of ours.  We demand academic integrity in each scholastic discipline, and rightfully so.  As Ben Stein's movie so irrefutably points out, science is the one academic arena receiving a hall pass from such requirements.
 
The movie is well made, and does a very fair job in portraying the opponent's viewpoints.  The critics response to the film has been, well, not surprising.  But I challenge all people, of all persuasions, to see this movie.  I do not have any doubt that the manner in which one interprets truth claims, scientific analysis, and all sorts of metaphysical considerations of these integrated subjects is completely tied in to their worldview.  I have no desire to see the worldviews of such angry atheists as Dawkins and Hitchens transition (I guess I should say, I have little hope).  And if a public university or tax-funded think tank wants to promulgate their worldview, even at the expense of the others, I suppose there is not much I can do.  But when these cowards do such in the name of science, they rob from the term any lasting dignity or relevance. 
 
See this movie, please.  The final scene interview Stein does with Richard Dawkins, in which he devastatingly admits that he has no idea how life began, and that Darwinian evolution can not account for it.  If you are a believer with young or teen children, see this movie.  If you are an incredibly rational and academically-minded kind of guy or girl, see this movie.  If you know there is no God, and are sure science proves such, see this movie.  At the end of the day, few people will change their minds about anything.  But at least eyes may be opened to what is really happening out there.  It is ugly.  And it is not science.  You can have faith in that.

"The idea of a God in a hierarchical universe is essential to coherent thought or uplifting culture of any kind.  A culture that does not aspire to the divine becomes obsessed with the fascination of evil, reveling in the frivolous, the depraved, and the bestial.  Without a sense of the transcendent, science ends up pursuing reductionist trivia, from the next particle or dimension of string to ever more abstruse arguments for the animality of man and the pointlessness of the universe."
 
                                                        - George Gilder