Bill vs. Ben: Battle of the WHO KNOWS??

It's a battle of two men who have the face for radio but made it big on TV (and for one, in the movies...well, a movie). It's a battle of two men whose religious convictions or lack thereof compelled them to link up with a documentary filmmaker (one to Larry Charles and the other to Nathan Frankowski). It's a battle of two men where there's gonna be a clear winner...maybe not hands down, but Bill's got the upper hand. (Two hand metaphors in one sentence does not a good blog entry make.) It's a battle between Bill Maher and Ben Stein.

The films are Religulous (I've been told it's a hard g...like my last name, k thanks) and Expelled. The first is about, well, you can read my earlier post. The second is Ben Stein's ode to intelligent design. Intelligent design is basically the belief that DNA is so complex that it couldn't have just happened naturally, some may say evolutionarily. It's as simple as that. And to pit the two docs face-to-face on this subject: while making fun of the curator of the Creation Museum, Maher makes it a point to say that neo-Darwinism is almost universally held within the scientific community. And...well, sorry Ben, it is...and I mean, we've seen it. I'll concede that Lucy may be a stretch, but see Peppered moths if you don't believe me or Bill.

But that's not really what I want to talk about here. Let's talk about their rhetoric. Which is well, assholish...I don't want to be too redundant on Bill, but he treats the uneducated masses as blind following drones and all believers -- the uneducated and the educated -- as people ignoring logic for the sake of their salvation. With Ben, he talks about how hard it is to be a believer -- or at least a questioner of science. Using a case study where an editor of a Smithsonian science journal got canned after publishing an article by a scholar who wrote an essay on the possibility/probability of intelligent design, Ben says that America has no free speech for those who question science. And from there he goes on to say that if you are a scientist or you're anyone who wants to be taken seriously by scientists, then you better not watch his movie because you'll be fired or lose friends. No, really, he says this in his movie. Ben actually tells you to stop watching. Does he think that people think so highly of his brainwashing abilities (it must be the hypnotic drone)? Cuz I mean, if I were a scientist and I told my frizzy-haired, bespectacled, labcoat-draped friends that I saw Expelled, they'd laugh at me, but they'd probably still let me sit at the microbiologist lunch table. And that's a good thing because the physiological ecologists are bitches.

Both movies are preaching to their respective choirs. But let's think about what both are trying to do: Ben's trying to get people to look at the evidence of such cases as sexual selection to allow oneself to get deeper into one's faith by championing a WHO KNOWS? mentality. Bill has his own brand of WHO KNOWS? But for Bill, some facts exist, that's science. And religion all this magic wand stuff is the big WHO KNOWS. The difference is that Ben's scare tactics are meant to turn people away from engaging with the facts of evolution. It's happened in our lifetime! You don't have to believe in the shit that's happened over millions of years, but by God, there's a million cases of natural/sexual selection that change gene pools EVERYDAY. Bill's trying to get people to stop getting so crazy defensive over something they can't even prove. Inevitably, the (Christian) believer would tell Bill, "Are you telling me my Bible is fiction?" To which he would say, "Yes." And well, there's nowhere that conversation can go for the 95% of Americans who don't know the historical facts of Bible authorship. Bill's underlying cause seems to be peace, yet his "You're a dummy" attitude is getting him nowhere. And Ben, well, Ben's a dummy.

Update: Religulous opened with $3.4 milliion in 502 theaters; in its opening weekend in April, Expelled did $3.0 million in 1,052.

--bryce