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A Weirdly Naked Appeal to Racism from the National Center for Science Education?


You simply must take a moment and watch the priceless trailer for No Dinosaurs in Heaven, the new documentary being promoted by our Darwin-lobbying friends at the National Center for Science Education. The NCSE is a group that wants to help soften up the religious community for Darwinian evolution. And this was their bright idea on how to do it? Wow. An attack on young earth creationism and secondarily, it seems, on intelligent design, the film opens a window on the mind of folks like the NCSE’s Eugenie Scott. It screens tonight at Queens College.No Dinosaurs in Heaven
If the mournful and inert trailer is a representative sample, the thing appears to be little more than a play to viewers’ intellectual vanity. There’s no scientific argument here as you’d get in an Illustra film, basically just images of people — adults and one kid — wrinkling their noses about how dumb and unscientific anti-evolutionary views are, accompanied by pretty footage of Dr. Scott on a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. The latter is by way of illustrating how primitive creationists are for believing in Noah’s Flood — the easiest target and the cheapest of all cheap shots in the Darwin lobbyist’s arsenal. Whenever they start in trying to conflate wooly arguments that the Flood produced the Grand Canyon with serious challenges to evolution like that from intelligent design, you get a sense of how blindingly desperate these Darwin-defenders must be.
Eugenie ScottWhat in the world was the filmmaker, Greta Schiller, thinking? As spokesman for the view that evolution is best taught with reference to the controversy over intelligent design, the film casts an unidentified black man missing what looks like half his teeth and speaking ungrammatically with an accent so thick he actually gets subtitles. Ms. Schiller then cuts directly to a white lady on Dr. Scott’s rafting trip who grumbles, “I don’t know how you could be smart enough to feed yourself and not believe in evolution.”
Is this a weirdly naked appeal to offensive stereotypes about race and intelligence, as it appears to be? Or just inept filmmaking? We’ll assume the latter, but…jeez!
Or rather, Jezebel! Incredibly, that’s the name of the film company, Jezebel Productions, that made No Dinos. You know, Jezebel like the villainous queen from the Bible who incited her husband King Ahab in the most notoriously depraved administration in the history of ancient Israel. Nice going, NCSE!