Today is the National Day of Prayer, in which our country seems to assume that religious people are incapable of deciding on their own when and how and with whom to pray without the direction and support of a worldly government.
They are also required to only allow Christians to run the show: “I commit that [National Day of Prayer] activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those with differing beliefs are welcome to attend.”
Auldrich has remained true to her pledge. “It’s a Judeo-Christian observance, and people of other faiths who ask about participating are encouraged to set aside their own day of prayer,” Auldrich told This Week Online in 2006. In other words, if you are not an evangelical, you can go hold your worship somewhere else.
Somehow, religion in our country managed to limp along until President Truman officially declared a National Day of Prayer. Phew! But it seemed that religion was still in such bad shape that it eventually also needed legislative action in the form of Ronald Reagan’s more permanent Day of Prayer solution.
Happily, this must alleviated the problem for most religions. But, apparently, evangelical Christianity is still in such dire straits that it needs some extra-special head-patting attention from Caesar in order to get on with its faith business.
Jews on First says the true meaning of the Day of Prayer has been lost. “What began as President Truman’s declaration of a National Prayer Day for all Americans is now excluding and dividing us on religious lines,” the group said.
Seriously though: why would anyone have ever expected anything different from anything involving the political process? As the founders realized, the practice of government is all about factions fighting for worldly power. It is a process that is both inevitably corrupting and rather obviously unnecessary to the free exercise of religion.
Congressional nonsense on the order of things like National Broccoli Week is silly enough (as the first President Bush rightly realized) without the government presuming to have any role to play in religious matters as well.
So, I went to see Premise Media’s Expelled. I paid my way (though matinée), sat alone in an empty theater, and took notes. And now it’s finally time to parse things for your pleasure.
Just as a framing device, I’ll pose some questions as a way to setup and organize my thoughts about various aspects of the film.
I should also clarify at the outset that I’m going to be treating figures who speak unopposed throughout the movie, people like Steven Meyer, David Berlinski, and so on, as if they speak for the film. I think, given how the film played out, this is perfectly fair. They are in some ways more the voice of the film than Stein, who basically is there to nod along and agree with them, or prompt them with leading questions. Indeed, aside from the bookend footage of Stein traveling to meet them or speaking at Pepperdine, I could just as easily imagine the film’s credits listing Berlinski, Meyer, Sternberg, and others as the opinionated hosts interviewing Ben Stein and trying to convince him of their position.
In honor of Expelled’s release, it’s really worth taking another long hard look at one of its key cases: the supposed destruction that rained down upon Dr. Richard Sternberg for publishing an article supporting Intelligent Design in a systematics journal. Since the crux of the film’s case (and the claims that even movie reviewers which hated the film bought into, is the idea that academics are wrongly persecuted merely for being open-minded) is that we’re living in another dogmatic Inquisition where merely questioning the scientific orthodoxy is career suicide, you’d think a little more attention would be given to seeing whether these claims really hold up to scrutiny.
The Discovery Institute makes a tepid response to the later, and you know what? It’s a good one for what it needs to do: which is simply to sound plausible at first. You read through it, and it sounds like it has some really strong points, and as long as you stop there, maybe you’ll think you’ve done your part, heard from both sides, and maybe split the difference.
As Ed Brayton at Dispatches notes, we now have at least six US state legislatures that are either considering or have already passed so called “academic freedom” bills: Louisiana, Missouri, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama. In various forms, they all claim to protect teachers from any repercussions for teaching what they term “scientific weaknesses with evolution.” The insincerity of this sudden concern for “academic freedom” is obvious, given that the bills do not protect teachers from teaching children about, say, birth control or 9/11 conspiracy theories. Only the usual stalking horse of conservative creationists is fair game for fifth-grade science teachers.
With so many similar bills appearing in such a short time, all with such similar language and intent, it’s pretty clear that we’re seeing a new phase of in creationist efforts to attack evolution in public school science class. For those unfamiliar, the first three main phases have been Creationism proper, Scientific Creationism, and Intelligent Design, all as outlined in this Dispatches post. The phases have all overlapped to some extent (most obviously in the recycling of many of the same arguments), and advocates of prior phases all remain, though often strategically friendly to the newest effort. But this 4th phase doesn’t go under any sort of banner or title: and that, in fact, is the whole point.
Motive Marketing, the outfit that was so successful at convincing churches around the country to buy up Passion of the Christ paraphernalia like crazy, is going into full gear to promote Ben Stein’s Expelled! movie.
While their breathless emails warn of dastardly “eblasts to their [Darwinists'] people encouraging them to highjack our efforts to promote EXPELLED,” most of our side of things is just sort of watching in amusement at the sheer clumsiness of trying to promote intelligent design as a legitimate scientific alternative to evolution… while gesturing wildly at the Bible at nearly every turn.
Here’s what I mean, from one of their “please spread the word and badger lots of people into coming to this movie” emails:
STUDENT EVANGELISM: Thus far science doesn’t specifically identify the CREATOR. Once your students take their friends to see EXPELLED, the question will be “so if ID is true, then WHO is this Intelligent Designer?”. Our friends at EVANGELISM EXPLOSION are offering training to equip your students in sharing their faith.
(Am I the only one who finds evangelism “explosion” a little bit creepy, and/or gross?)
And in case you just so happen to be a pastor at a church looking to preach a sermon on the totally scientific issue of intelligent design: do they have just the powerpoint slides for you! (Yes, seriously)
You have to feel a little sorry for Intelligent Design fans who have spent so much time trying to insist that their movement is all about suppressed science, rather than trying to please Jesus.
What if you held an on-message conference call to promote your movie, and everybody came?
Well, the producers of Expelled did just that, and amongst everybody was the last person they wanted to hear from: PZ Myers. Myers listened to them go on and on, but when they started claiming that no one had ever “addressed the content of the movie,” he couldn’t let that stand, and he spoke up and jumped all over them.
Now, this sort of thing isn’t quite my MO, but in this case, I’m with Myers all the way. The Expelled producers have been presenting themselves as brave truth-tellers just looking for a debate, but in reality they’ve been hiding in a tightly controlled bubble of evangelical adoration and press releases. They deserve to get called out on this hypocrisy. I’ve been trying to call them out on this cowardice for some time.
Anyone who’s been reading this blog, or nearly ANY science-friendly blog that’s covered this movie has seen countless posts addressing the claims Stein and his cohorts make in this movie. We’ve covered all of their subjects in FAR far more detail than they have. And we’ve seen almost nothing in return. It’s the standard creationist crackup: they throw out a huge list of plausible sounding but ultimately cynically false claims and then can’t be bothered to stick around and seriously defend them. Instead, they just rush on to the next venue and repeat the same stuff all over again as if no one had ever pointed out their duplicity.
Who is dodging “substance” here? Myers takes their arguments to pieces, specifically and directly. He’s certainly not nice about it, but he doesn’t dodge their claims, he cuts right into them. Their response? Not to address his points. Not to defend their arguments. Instead they spend thousands of words hinting about the “thought police” and making fun of Myers for actually spending time responding to their harmless little posts!
We’ll see how long they can keep up this little game. We’ll see how long they can keep ignoring the arguments of their critics and hopping from one right-wing think-tank ego-strokefest to another. We’re waiting.
Quidam, over at the deceptively named Antievolution messageboards, has decided to review the gallantly Godwinizing creationist film Expelled! in the form of interpretive photoshop:
The folks responsible forExpelled!, our favorite feckless film project, are now busy celebrating the fact that they are being laughed at. Apparently borne of a bout of bitter vindictiveness, producer Mark Mathis’s decision to ban one of his interviewees (PZ Myers) from one of the film’s early showings has finally given them the sort of bad publicity that they’ve been craving. So it’s hard to feel too bad for them.
But the attempt to spin the story is now becoming something of a story in itself (which is good, because honestly, I think the otherwise fleeting incident has been getting more lasting attention at this point than it deserves). The film’s production company has now issued the usual unctuous defense-via-press-release, confusing getting lots of attention by via buffoonery as the same thing as being the most popular kid in school. PZ Myers, the amused anathema himself, picks its claims to pieces. It’s almost unnecessary. Just about every story they’ve put out on this incident has been different, and then all of those interpretations belied by the facts. They keep alleging that their critics are lying… but then failing to explain how and about what.
On the official Expelled! blog, the task of mustering a blustery defense apparently fell to the spacey “Deacon Blue.” This is the same mysterious Steely Dan fan who once posted a diatribe so strange and disjointed that it was actually scrubbed from the blog entirely. In it, Deacon expressed a devotion for Ben Stein’s own jumbled ranting that bordered on the psychotic:
And if we re-read Ben Stein’s words here again and again (as I have)…we may still not quite comprehend the full implications of his thoughts. But keep trying, if you misunderstood them…it’s worth it. (emphasis, amazingly, in the original)
Deacons’ non-defense of the conduct of the producers is of a piece with the rest of their effort: full of innuendo and sneering implications, but seemingly incapable of defending any substantive point or accusation. Instead, it’s all summed up with repeating hinting that because people are laughing at their clumsiness, that this means that their enemies are scared of them.
We’re all beginning to wonder: are striking these poser attitudes all creationists have left at this point? They’re hip rebels. They’re resolute victims. They’re selfless martyrs. Jazz hands!
Ok, but didn’t you guys used to claim that you had, you know, some good scientific arguments? I mean, you still say you do, but it seems almost as if you’re so embarrassed by them yourselves that you can’t do more than occasionally reference them in criticism free venues before quickly moving on to apparently deeper and serious matters like calling everyone Hitler and claiming to celebrate academic freedom without apparently understanding what the “academic” part means or requires.
He does entirely too much of the “expulsion” of PZ Myers from the showing. He’s right on every point of course, but it’s too much of a trivial event rehashed when the film itself is the issue, and it seems to come at the expense of getting the sort of detailed summary of the film’s claims. Still, what is there does not disappoint:
Stein has no talent for comedy, as he demonstrates in a weird joke about scratching his back, which falls completely flat. But his attempt to do tragedy is even worse. He visits Dachau and, when informed by the guide that lots of Jews had been killed there, he buries his face in his hands as though this is the first time he has heard of it. Obviously it was not his intention, but I thought his rotten acting was an insult to the memory of the victims.
Indeed. I seriously can’t think of anything more sickening about this film than the flogging of Holocaust victims just to help beat the drum of Stein’s historically inept ideology. Real historians all snort in derision, at best, at the ludicrously simplistic and grossly selective connections Stein and Co. draw between Darwin and the Nazi gas chambers. But because Expelled! cannot seriously debate scientists on the evolutionary evidence for any length of time, little is left to do but to grab Godwin and run with it.
Dawkins explanation of the way the film mangles his discussion of alien designers (a hypothetical that Stein apparently asked him to speculate on in the first place) is also an excellent illustration of the sort of intellectual vacuity that pervades everything we’ve yet seen or heard from this production:
My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment — however implausible — was designed to illustrate intelligent design’s closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphatically NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don’t think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.
Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won’t get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. “What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN.” “Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE.”
This, along with Stein’s sarcastic shock over “mud crystals” as one of the abiogenetic theories proposed for the formation of self-reproducing molecules, really doesn’t speak well of the film’s intellectual depth. Ideas, even if hypothetical or speculative, are simply declared ludicrous without getting more than a few seconds summary of the issues involved.
One could very easily make a film about quantum mechanics that would have audiences rolling in the aisles with how ridiculous it all is. It wouldn’t be an honest film, though.
Some more of the footage from the Intelligent Design film Expelled! is becoming available. In this case, it’s some of the footage that the producers bought from unwitting scientists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, both of whom are, in addition to being scientist, are also proponents of atheism. That is, of course, no accident: the message of the film is that evolution is an ideology, not science, and trying to confuse scientific evidence with the personal opinions of atheists in particular is key to that strategy.
But geez: this is some pretty darn tame stuff:
No burning down the churches, no banning public expression of belief: just the hope that as people learn more, they will become less religious. This was the best they could get for their supposedly damning clips?
And really, this expression of secular hopes are not exactly the only view out there about how science affects religion and vice-versa. Though atheists like Dawkins and Myers are of course critical, there are plenty of other scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth Miller who feel that their religious convictions were enhanced by their understanding of science, rather than hurt. As far as we know, based on the now numerous summaries of the films content (and honestly, there’s ultimately not too much of deep substance to begin with in any film), none of these sorts of voices receive honest recognition or expression as pretty obvious counter-examples against the “evolution is an atheist religion” accusation.
The fact that science makes some God some beliefs (like Young Earth Creationism) untenable and others (like more deistic beliefs) unnecessary is a consequence of the scientific evidence, not the cause of it. That the filmmakers went to such dishonest lengths just to spend hours filming scientists talking about atheism, rather than science, just goes to show how desperate they are to avoid confrontation with this reality.
Update: Somewhat late, but Rush Limbaugh apparently loved Expelled! Who could have seen that coming? Unfortunately, he doesn’t do much more than repeat, undefended, the same litany of accusations that the film pushes, and then somehow add all of this rambling ranting up to the conclusion that (the religious!) Democratic candidate for President, Barack Obama, is terrible for the country.
The producers of the creationist fan-flick Expelled! have lately been shopping their movie to right-wing and religious outlets all over the country: screening it mostly for the rather bizarre purpose of trying to get activists on board to promote it when it opens.
At the very same time they’ve been bloviating about free speech and the merits of open discussion, they’ve been dodging any critical press questions, inventing new ways to completely avoid addressing substantive criticisms, and doing their best to make sure that critics are kicked out of their promotional film screenings.
But now it seems like they’ve really slipped up: they apparently spent so much effort making sure that small-town scienceblogger PZ Myers would be screened out of a recent showing at the Mall of America that they completely missed none other than Richard Dawkins, coincidentally visiting from England.
When the film’s own marketing company puts something like “YOUR NAME WILL BE ON A LIST AT THE DOOR. NO TICKET IS NEEDED. IDs WILL BE CHECKED” in their rsvp confirmation emails, you know that wild stories about how Myers was trying to break into the showing “without a ticket” when in fact he had registered like everyone else under his own name, are flatly phony.
Meanwhile, the same domain-name discrepancy I noted way back when with the producer’s claims to have innocently used “Crossroads” as a “working title” for the film is getting some new scrutiny from Wes Elsberry. To re-iterate, contrary to their protestations, the producers seem to have registered the Expelled! trademark (and, obviously, decided on the extremely one-sided message that title represents) months before they solicited interviews under the name “Crossroads.” And they even seem to have invented the “Rampant Films” company name and website to advance the deception further.
Update 2: Dawkins and PZ chat about their experience:
I’m inclined at this point to think that people are making a bit too much of this. It’s stupid and, as Dawkins said, inept on the part of the producers, but in the end not exactly front page news or even a particularly solid and unambiguous PR victory. It’s just one more example in a litany of examples of the bizarre, hypocritical, and dishonest nature of this production.
Florida Republican creationists, hot of their self-bamboolzement in the recent science standards debate, are now attempting to pass a bill that purports to defend academic freedom in public high schools. Lawmakers are even getting a special (closed to the public!) screening of Intelligent Design agitprop doc Expelled! to help them “consider the issues.”
But just what is the bill in question, and what does it do?
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