I'm sure most readers are tired of hearing about Expelled, but this was just too revealing to pass up.

Also see PZ Myers' blog post on this:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/02/hypocrisy_from_the_expelled_gu.php

Reposted from:
http://www.coloradoconfidential.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3463

Ben Stein and the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed held a press conference. But hardly any questions were allowed.

Over the past couple thousand years, a lot of people have tried to establish convincing rational proofs of God.

In Summa Theologica, for instance, written between 1265 and 1274, Thomas Aquinas produced five arguments for the existence of God, one of which was the "argument of design." Aquinas said that an intelligent being whom we call God guides natural bodies.

19th century theologian William Paley in 1802 argued that if you found a watch on the ground, you'd be likely to posit a watchmaker. If you find yourself in the midst of a universe far more complex than a watch, you'd likely posit a Designer God. Q.E.D.

German Catholic theologian Hans Küng wrote a lengthy book titled Does God Exist?, a question he answered in the affirmative. "Some time ago," Küng wrote in 1978, "an English Nobel prizewinner is supposed to have answered the question whether he believed in God: 'Of course not. I am a scientist.' This book is sustained by the hope that a new age is dawning when the very opposite answer will be given: 'Of course. I am a scientist.'"

Ben Stein is not satisfied with these efforts. Stein, best known as the boring economics teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and his cohorts in the movie trade have felt it necessary to rush to God's defense against the assaults of science in the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

I wrote a review of Expelled on this site in December. The producers inadvertently invited us to a screening of it. As I said at the time, they were kind enough to invite me, so I feel bad about disliking it so much.

They disliked my review. So much that they now ask people who watch the film to sign nondisclosure agreements before they see it. (Expelled won't be officially released until April.) So much, that they put 72 links of commentary on their website, but omit my review, the only one of the 72 who had actually seen the movie. I am crushed, I tell you. Crushed.

Roger Moore, a reviewer for the Orlando Sentinel was also inadvertently invited to a screening, where he refused to sign one of these nondisclosure agreements, bless his heart. You can read what Moore thought of the movie here.

I thought the Expelled crowd was done with me, but lo! I received an email invitation to a telephone press conference with Stein and the producers in late January.

Now if Expelled can be said to have a theme, it is that all sorts of ideas should be batted around the ballfield of science and theology, that there should be freedom of expression. I was jazzed. I'd get to ask my questions. It would be American intellectual combat at its most naked. As producer Walt Ruloff put it:

"What we're really asking for is freedom of speech, and allowing science, and students, people in applied or theoretical research to have the freedom to go where they need to go and as the questions."

This makes it ironic, at least, that they expected the Orlando Sentinel to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

But there are limits. Let's face it. We all have them. Freedom of expression is unseemly at an Expelled press conference. There was no give-and-take, no open marketplace of ideas, in fact, scarcely any questions at all. Ruloff and Stein batted one softball after another out of the park from those posed by Paul Lauer, a representative of the film's public relations firm. Questions from non-employees had to be submitted by email. Lauer (or somebody at his firm) screened them.

I'm not sure whether Thomas Aquinas handled media inquiries this way. I'll have my people get back to your people on that.

The questions that made it through the screening were from: Listen Up TV, a Christian program; the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention; Focus on the Family; and the Colorado Catholic Herald. Four outside questions in 50 minutes of press conference, only two of which can be described as "press."

I've participated in a lot of press conferences in my thirty years as a journalist. I once bumped into President Gerald Ford on the front lawn of the White House. I had a question for him, which he politely answered. I went to a press conference by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who took all of our questions and hung around afterward to talk with me. I've had press conference questions answered by physicists Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, "father of the hydrogen bomb"; by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson; by John Wayne; by U.S, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney; by U.S. Sens. Alan Simpson, Craig Thomas, John Kerry, Malcolm Wallop and Gary Hart, and by lots and lots of other public figures whose time I've wasted. Some of my questions were argumentative, but all were thoroughly - if sometimes equally argumentatively -- answered.

Until I got to Ben Stein. Though calling for the rough-and-tumble of openness and debate, Stein didn't have time for questions.

In my earlier review, I dealt with Expelled as a failed and dull attack on evolution. But this "press conference" convinced me that not only is Expelled and the intellectual movement behind it hypocritical in its supposed defense of "freedom of expression," it's an attack on the entire superstructure of science and technology that has created the modern world. Expelled is anti-rational.

To quote from the media extravaganza (all the quotes that follow are from the Expelled staff's transcript of the phone call):

Paul Lauer: You mentioned that Darwinism appears to be lacking on certain fronts. From your research, and your travels, and interviews with many different scientists, what are some of the areas that scientists are, perhaps, increasingly saying are problematic with the theory of, Darwin's Theory of Evolution?

Ben Stein:Well, just a couple of them, I've already hit one is: Where did life come from? Second one is: How did the cell get so complex? Third one, which I think is overwhelming, and just sort of blows the whole theory of Random Mutation out of the water, is, at least, let me say, raises big questions, that is. Assuming it all did happen by Random Mutation and Natural Selection, where did the laws of gravity come from. Where did the laws of thermodynamics come from? Where did the laws of motion and, of heat come from? Where, I guess that's the same as thermodynamics. Where did all these laws, that make it possible for the universe to function, where did they all come from? Why isn't all just chaos and everything collapsing in on itself and killing everything? I think that`s where the universe works. Who created these perfect laws, that keeps the planet in motion, keeps the blood pumping through our bodies? So, I think, all these are giant questions that need answers.

Giant questions, indeed. However, only one of them -- the complexity of the cell -- has anything to do with Darwinism or evolution. The others are very interesting questions, especially why the conditions of the universe seem to be so finely attuned to human existence. They are active and important areas of research across many fields, primarily physics. But evolutionary theory does not argue that the laws of gravity arose from natural selection, or that natural selection keeps the planets in motion. Stein is getting his Ferris confused with his Bueller.

Except for the evolutionary theorists, atheists and other Darwinists appearing in Expelled all of whom answered questions forthrightly, Stein and company seem to have interviewed an exceptionally cowardly crop of scientists. Here's what producer Walt Ruloff had to say:

Paul Lauer: Sure. Walt, there was some out there who wanted to speak on this issue but they were afraid to show their identity. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Walt Ruloff: Yeah, we interviewed many, many, many scientists, who, first of all, we talked to hundreds and hundreds of scientists who wouldn't even talk - wouldn't even go on camera, even if we assured them that we were going to black them out. So, the ones that finally did, there were dozens of scientists that we were able to do that with. The reason why they need to do that is because if they stray from the current orthodoxy, if they stray from a Darwinian position, and you'll see this in the movie, these people have been called in to their superiors' office and have lost their jobs, or have been denied tenure, or have been so discredited by the powers that be, that their future, and their hopes and dreams of being a scientist have been squashed, and so, this is a real problem, as we've discussed.

I've been interviewing scientists nearly every day for twenty years. Don't get me started. I have a lot of complaints about them. But refusing to defend their research isn't one. Most of the time, you can't get 'em to shut up. They are so eager to promote their latest hypothesis that I still don't know whether it's safe to drink coffee or not. The concept of "hundreds and hundreds of scientists" afraid to talk about their favorite idea is so unlike real life that I have to question - how to put this politely? - Ruloff's support for this assertion. But then I haven't talked to every scientist in the world. Maybe I just missed these hundreds and hundreds.

In my experience, scientists are forthright, diligent and feverishly eager to promote their ideas. There is no greater scientific laurel to be gained than to overturn the reigning paradigm. I get periodic emails from a wonderful man, a respected nuclear chemist, who has a groundbreaking idea about the makeup of the sun. He thinks it's a ball of iron. The world's leading solar physicist described these ideas to me as "crackpot science." Does this make my nuclear chemist shy of publicity? Does it make him quake in the shadows and hide from the cameras? Is he so terrified of the solar physics establishment that he can't eat his morning cereal? No. He sends out another blanket email with dense formulae, along with a polite note. But the sun remains un-ironed.

Evidence that evolutionary theory was wrong would rock the world of biology, permanently assuring the immortality of the discoverer, putting him or her in the pantheon of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin and Einstein.

And that wouldn't be even an ankle tattoo on the guy who discovers the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas would be spinning in his grave.

The key word here, though, is "evidence." Even Aquinas knew that arguments aren't proof. Simply finding Darwinism inconvenient is not sufficient grounds for rejection. So what is it that's keeping these quivering aspens from appearing on camera? Fear of funding? No. Lack of evidence. You'd be scared too, going into a battle of wits unarmed.

I hate to say this, Walt Ruloff and Ben Stein having spent a lot of money to make this movie and all, but it seems to me more likely that these frightened scientists just don't exist. I'm calling "Bullshit."

So I sent a question to the Expelled people during their media extravaganza in the naïve assumption that it would be like every other press conference I've been invited to participate in over the past thirty years.

And this was my question:

The National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report saying that "The rapid advances now being made in the life sciences and in medicine rest on principles derived from an understanding of evolution." The report cites successes in combating the SARS virus, development of drought and pest resistant crops, and the creation of enzymes to make corn-based ethanol, as recent developments to which evolutionary theory was indispensable. If evolution inspires as much evil as your film argues that it does, should we refuse to use these technologies until they can be replicated by an intelligent-design-based research program?