Stein on 'Expelled'

I posted earlier about the movie Expelled. Well, two weeks ago, Ben Stein was in Rochester, Minn., speaking at a meeting I was covering. I had a chance to ask him about the movie. Here is what he said:

Expelled is a movie about a serious issue of academic suppression. Every person in this room, including yours truly, would agree that Darwin’s theory of evolution explains a huge amount about how speicies evolved. It doesn’t answer some of the very basic questions such as where did gravity come from? Where did thermo dynamics come from? Where did life originate?

Darwin himself said these are questions beyond my ability to figure out. For me to try to figure them out would be like a dog trying to figure out a law of physics. In fact, Darwin said, the way I see it, some of existence was designed and some happened by accident.

But in today’s modern campus setting, you are not allowed to say that. You are not even allowed to say what Darwin said. You have to say it is all accident, random mutation and natural selection. If you say, "Look, can we go back to where Darwin started?" and ask the question on that basis, you get ostracized and lose your job.

We think that is a serious abrogation of the laws of freedom of speech in this country and we’re concerned about it and that’s why we made the movie.