I’d be interested to see if this site would review Michael Moore’s scuzzy and deceptive BS films in similar fashion.

In fact, as noted, when this film was first announced, one of my first comments was that it seemed like they were going the “Michael Moore” route. It was not meant as a compliment.

I have massive amounts of respect for Ben Stein.

I would say that any evenhanded look at what he’s done with this film should cost him quite a bit of respect.

His articles on finance have helped me improve my life, and his views are, generally, very mainstream even if he is right of center.

We’ll have to disagree on that one. His views seem to run on the WorldNetDaily side of all things conservative, which is generally not a good thing in my book when it comes to reasoned discourse.

I highly doubt there was any “duping” if he was involved in the interview process. Ben is very much upfront about how he handles things.

Doubt all you want, I think the case for that is very strong, as I’ve explained here and in all the subsequent evidence thats come out later. And not just the interview process. His debate of the issues both in the film and in interviews is flatly infantile.

Plus, Moore is a master of editing who takes things terribly out of context, and splices them in with other clips, creating a pastiche concept of “interview”.

I’d say not.

I don’t support intelligent design, I do support the ability of people to have a voice regardless of how fatuous or scuzzy their tactics. I have no love of journalistic tactics of this nature, but it’s a fact that it’s FAR more common from the left than the right, simply because the left virtually owns Hollywood.

I have massive amounts of respect for Ben Stein. Unlike a Michael Moore, he’s intelligent, well spoken, and funny. His articles on finance have helped me improve my life, and his views are, generally, very mainstream even if he is right of center. I highly doubt there was any “duping” if he was involved in the interview process. Ben is very much upfront about how he handles things.

They were tricked into letting a bunch of creationists use their names, faces, and status as a means to promote creationist ideas in a production that’s fundamentally dishonest: something they never would have knowingly agreed to. Since these guys are all ardent anti-creationists, they obviously are against the promotion of creationism, including helping it out.

All of these guys have debated and addressed the claims of creationists many times over: but they do it in a way that actually addresses substantive arguments, rather than just giving creationists a nice big billboard advertisement for their beliefs, which is all creationists ever really seem to want when demanding that scientists pay attention to them.

And it’s pretty clear that some of the comments from the anti-ID scientists ARE taken out of context: they are presented as a) the principles of science rather than these people’s particular opinions and positions, and b) the film apparently treats hypothetical musings, as with Dawkins on aliens, as if they were being presented as scientific conclusions.

portrayed as the biased narrowminded people they are who do not want anyone to expose the fact that what they are teaching has huge holes in it.

Why is it that we get nearly nothing but hot air from you guys on this issue. Whether or not these scientists really are biased or narrow-minded or not depends crucially on the issues of whether ID has scientific merit or not, and whether the claimed “huge holes” actually pan out. Creationists are fond of making such accusations, but as with this film, apparently loathe to stick around and actually try to defend those accusations on neutral ground, with all the evidence there to be compared to their claims.

Not even that they might actually be wrong or right but that nobody should be allowed to question them.

It never gets more pathetic than this, I guess. Here are folks who sit around, committed to the scientific method, committed to the evidence. And then come along a bunch of PR people, with no concept of what science is and no commitment at all to its method, claiming that because scientists actually (gasp!) want to apply scientific standards to zany creationist claims, that they are thought Nazis.

It’s all basically just an elaborate way to avoid having to engage in a scientific debate they know they are bound to lose (because they’ve always lost before). Instead of debating the truth of the matter, they just fill all the air time whining about suppression and lack of questioning.

Have you watched the YouTube critiques on Lee Strobel’s film The Case for a Creator? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH3i4a6HSGs] I really enjoyed these videos — I’m still gathering up arguments to refute the inevitable ID arguments I’m bound to face in the near future.