Field of Battle
May 04, 2006

It's not just the SEED folks who are battling the Intelligent Design folks in the With all due respect to the folks at SEED, the battlefield of Intelligent Design isn't in the courts, or the labs, and the school boards. Now the fight has come to my house, the film festival.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, for example, a prominent plant evolutionist jumped into the origins-of-life fray, doing verbal battle with a leading proponent of intelligent design.

Tom Givnish, a botany professor at the University of Wisconsin, sat down with conservative author and intelligent design advocate Jack Cashill and others to discuss, sometimes heatedly, the origins of life and what seems to be a growing schism between faith and science.

Given how trivializing ID is, I suppose "discussion" is too kind a term, yet because of it's lingering prominence in the opinions of over half the American public, it's still fodder for film and ground for discussion afterwards. As most of us know, discussion means the opportunity for a smiling representative of the Simple Simon Story School to popularize their delusions with feel good, "just-so" stories. At Tribecca, the IDers accepted this calling with aplomb, sending Jack Cashill to sing, dance and deceive:

...at the panel, Cashill spoke clearly, using sound bites and a smooth rhetorical style.

His polished approach demonstrates how, despite 150 years of research and a near-universal scientific consensus behind them, evolutionists are losing the public relations battle to intelligent design advocates. Givnish acknowledges that scientists will have trouble mounting a TV-friendly charm offensive.

"(Intelligent design supporters) tell a simple story, one that a 6-year-old can understand," Givnish said. "Scientists have more complicated stories to tell. That doesn't make them wrong."

I'm glad Tom Givnish was there to counter empty rhetoric, and I'm really pleased that the film that served as the jumping off point for the discussion, Flock of Dodos, challenges the ID movement.

But with the dearth of science knowledge and education in the United States, and with the power of movies to tell stories so effectively, I'm concerned at how easy it is for pro-ID films, videos and movies to keep the silly idea alive. ID is about feeling over thought and, for the most part, movies are too. We still haven't had a film that does for the death of ID in media circles what the Dover Decision did for law. Someone really needs to write and shoot one.

Excuse me, I've got to get back to writing. My film shoot is in a little over two weeks and I'm behind schedule.

Posted by Jody at May 4, 2006 07:25 AM

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