Actor, commentator and comedian, Ben Stein’s new documentary film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” opens April 18. Many Christian conservative leaders are on board with the film and so are we. The film was shown at a recent National Religious Broadcasters meeting and is scheduled to be the topic of an upcoming Focus on the Family broadcast. Some 200 students at Southern Seminary recently got a free sneak preview of the film and gave it high marks.

We believe Stein is correct when he says he’s involved in one of the leading cultural and political battles of his life: the fight for academic freedom against an establishment that teaches Darwinian evolution as fact.

“Intelligent Design (ID), the belief that certain aspects of the world are so complex they must have been created by an intelligent being, instead of by a random process, deserves a place at the academic table,” Stein says.

Stein interviews Guillermo Gonzalez, a supporter of ID and an astronomy professor at Iowa State University who was denied tenure, as well as Caroline Crocker, a biology teacher at George Mason University who was forced out because she questioned Darwinian evolution and introduced Intelligent Design in the classroom.

Stein also speaks with Richard Sternberg, a biologist who was ridiculed and harassed by his peers at the Smithsonian Institution for allowing the publishing of a pro-Intelligent Design paper in an academic journal. Sternberg’s plight received national attention in 2005-06 and even led to a congressional investigation that found top officials had desired to make Sternberg’s “life at the Museum as difficult as possible and encourage him to leave.”

Stein also interviews Southwestern Seminary philosophy professor William Dembski, one of the nation’s leading supporters of Intelligent Design. “This film exposes the hypocrisy of an academic and cultural elite who pretend that they value freedom of inquiry and expression but in fact suppress it when it clashes with their deeply held materialistic convictions,” Dembski said.

Unlike biblical creationism, ID does not begin with the Genesis account of creation, nor do its proponents attempt to describe the nature of the intelligence that designed the universe. Despite this fact, Dembski noted, “ID is friendly to Christian theism in a way that materialistic forms of evolution never have been.”

We agree with Dembski when he told the Southern Baptist Texan that those who need to see the movie most are “parents of children in high school or college, as well as those children themselves, who may think that the biological sciences are a dispassionate search for truth about life but many of whose practitioners see biology, especially evolutionary biology, as an ideological weapon to destroy faith in God.

“One of the biggest obstacles to people coming to Christ in Western culture is the impression that science has disproved the Bible and Christianity,” he said. “ID helps to correct this false impression by showing that our best science supports belief in a higher intelligence responsible for life.”

While the movie is rated PG for thematic elements and very brief language, we still recommend that our readers support the film. For more information visit www.getexpelled.com or www.expelledthemovie.com.