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Large majorities of Americans continue to reject Darwinian evolution as an answer to the origin of life despite the hegemony it enjoys in the academy, popular culture, government and the news media. Americans who are concerned about the unwillingness of our societal elite to consider the flaws of evolution can send a message about our unrelenting rejection of Darwinism by seeing the new documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.”

It has been my privilege to see “Expelled” at two private screenings in the last couple of months and I will be taking my family to see it April 18 when it opens in theaters nationwide because I want to remind the ruling elite that there are still millions of Americans who remain convinced Darwin doesn’t answer life’s most profound questions.

Starring Ben Stein, a veritable Renaissance man—actor, attorney, presidential speechwriter, comedian, “Expelled” exposes outrageous censorship against highly credentialed scientists who dare to question Darwinism in the academy, explains how Darwinism is fiercely protected by the cultural elite and puts into historical perspective the ethical implications of Darwinism, as demonstrated in Nazi Germany.

The recent evolution debate in Florida has vividly illustrated this reality.

Both during the State Board of Education consideration of new science standards that require the teaching of dogmatic Darwinian theory and more recently during debate in the Florida Legislature as evolution academic freedom bills have advanced, defenders of evolution have employed all the typical scare tactics and misinformation about the science of evolution in a desperate attempt to shut down any meaningful consideration of evolution’s flaws and weaknesses in the classroom.

Unlike academic freedom bills under consideration in the Legislature, “Expelled” does examine an alternative theory, Intelligent Design, which postulates that the intricate design evident in human beings and the natural world undermines Darwinism’s argument of a common ancestry for all living things evolving over billions of years by means of natural selection.

Chillingly, and perhaps most controversially, “Expelled” connects the dots of the philosophical underpinnings of Darwinism’s natural selection and survival of the fittest with Nazi Germany’s rationalizations that resulted in the Holocaust.

In an interview with me last month while he was in Tallahassee to screen his film, Stein said, “Almost no one says there’s no connection,” while conceding there were other factors that contributed to Nazism and the Holocaust.

“But Darwinism provided an intellectual foundation and—almost in the minds of the people doing it—respectability for the industrialization of mass murder,” Stein, a Jew, told me.

The movie also pulls the curtain back on the reality that Darwinism’s chief defenders are motivated not by the scientific method, but first by their philosophical presupposition against the supernatural and in favor of atheism. It is particularly instructive that it is the Darwinists themselves who make their philosophical presuppositions clear in their candid comments about the incompatibility of belief in God with Darwinism.

Most telling, in an interview with Richard Dawkins, an Oxford University evolutionist and author of The God Delusion, Stein asks whether there is any possibility that Intelligent Design may turn out to be true. Shockingly and sounding a bit like the introduction to “Star Wars” (“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...”), Dawkins admits the possibility, but with a strange twist: “It could come about in the following way: It could be that at some earlier time somewhere in the universe a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now, that is a possibility and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology. You might find a signature of some sort of designer.”

Stein interjects with amazement, “Wait a second! Richard Dawkins thought Intelligent Design might be a legitimate pursuit?”

Dawkins adds: “And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to come about by some explicable or ultimately explicable process. You couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That’s the point.”

Dawkins goes on to explain his rejection of all notions of deity: “Any god, anywhere, would be completely incompatible with anything that I’ve said.”

Asked if he ultimately “runs into God” in the afterlife and is asked about his atheism, Dawkins tells Stein, “Bertrand Russell had that point put to him and he said something like, ‘Sir, why did you take such pains to hide yourself?’”

In fact, God has not hidden Himself from Dawkins or the rest of the world. This is the tragedy of Dawkins and others like him whose philosophical worldview requires they reject the evidence God has given for Himself in His creation. Instead of seeing God in that design, Dawkins’ philosophical naturalism—that is, his religion, not science—dictates that he reject the supernatural in favor of “some kind of Darwinian means” from another world that would have “seeded” life on Earth.

The Apostle Paul describes Dawkins in Romans 1:18-22 where he talks about “… men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools….”

Incredibly, Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent atheists in the world, admits he sees design in the universe, but suppresses that truth and demonstrates his foolishness by speculating that an alien civilization is more likely to be responsible for life on Earth than is God—and even those aliens would have evolved by Darwinian means.

This is not science. Demonstrating this fact is one of the most important values of “Expelled.” And, since Darwinists are arguing from a philosophical worldview, we who have a different philosophical worldview grounded in the truth of Scripture must not back down when evolutionists insist that religiously motivated persons are second-class citizens in this debate.

“Expelled” is clearly not a Christian movie. But this film is certainly worthy of Christian support. And, by giving such support, we and other Americans who remain unconvinced of Darwinism can send a message to the culture that our convictions cannot be expelled from this critical debate.