Note: This interview first appeared in the April issue of Citizen magazine.
Anyone who’s heard the phrase, “Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?” will recognize Ben Stein: He spoke the catchphrase in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
It’s a story of a rebellious teen who takes yet another day off from school.
As Stein explained to CitizenLink, his new movie, Expelled, also deals with rebellion. Only this time, he’s encouraging students to rebel — against Big Science, which crowned Darwin as king and won’t allow freedom of speech into the classroom. The movie opens nationwide April 18.
1. Why do so many people remember your line 22 years after Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?
It calls to mind so many situations where you’re trying to get someone’s attention, and you just can’t get his attention. That’s so annoying and maddening. I think people realize my phrase is the sort of ultimate phrase you say in frustration. That seemed like a natural phrase to use in this movie, Expelled, when we’re trying to get people’s attention.
2. You’ve said the consequences of Darwinism have been “terrifying and horrible.” Is that why you signed on to this project?
Darwinism had led to academic suppression. Anyone who questioned the orthodoxy of Darwinism was losing his job, getting harassed, losing his grants, losing his office, her office. This was not supposed to happen in a country based upon freedom of speech. I was very worried about that.
Darwinism got rolling in the 19th century, but no one would have dreamed that the Nazis would “decode” them to mean survival of the fittest, using industrial technology to eliminate people they deemed to be just specks of mud. If I wipe some mud off my car windshield, who cares? Similarly, the Nazis thought, “If I wipe some Jews off the windshield of history, who cares? They’re just specks of mud.”
3. What do you hope people, specifically teens, will do after watching Expelled?
If you’re taught something, and asked to take it on faith, in your science class, then you should say, “Sir, you’re asking me to take it on faith. And if we’re talking about things that are taken on faith, then could we also talk about Intelligent Design, which is my faith?”
No science teacher can tell a student how life originated on this earth, or anywhere. No science teacher can tell anyone for sure where matter originated. A biology teacher cannot offer any evidence of a single, distinct species that has evolved under observation. You can clearly see the effects of gravity. Where is the observed proof of Darwinism?
4. Do you think this film will help restore freedom of speech in the classroom?
I think this will open the eyes of a number of people, of parents and children, about how they’re being taught things that cannot be seen. Little by little, that may shake some foundations. What we eventually want is a judge who would say, “I don’t see why this couldn’t be taught in the classroom, at least as a hypothesis.” At that point, it’s Katy bar the door.
5. What would you like to say to Darwin?
"You are a wealthy man, you married a wealthy woman, why don’t you just live quietly out in the countryside and not torture us with your half-baked suppositions, which have caused so much misery?"
I want to emphasize, Darwin was not like the crazed neo-Darwinists of today. Darwin believed in the freedom of inquiry. He encouraged there to be further study and debate. He said that in writing before he died.
Neo-Darwinists ask us to believe in things not seen. We’re not supposed to have an established religion in America, but we do, and it’s called Darwinism.
DR. DOBSON TALKS WITH BEN STEIN
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