Posts on Ben Stein

After a month, “Expelled”—the anti-evolution film starring Ben Stein—is fading from the scene with disappointing sales (although associate producer Mark Mathis says he’s pleased). The movie’s efforts to portray Intelligent Design creationism as a valid scientific field being persecuted by the authorities probably never had a chance with academics familiar with these dubious creationist arguments, but then again, it probably wasn’t the movie’s intention to convince scientists that ID was a legitimate scientific theory. Instead, “Expelled” took its battle against evolution to the political arena.

This was apparent in the film’s marketing strategy of reaching out to right-wing media outlets and activists, who embraced the half-baked Darwin-Hitler connection at the center of “Expelled.”

And—regarding the strange subplot of Yoko Ono suing over the film’s use of John Lennon’s song “Imagine” without getting the rights—a lawyer for the movie recently argued that the film’s message is pegged toward influencing this year’s presidential election, according to the AP:

A lawyer for the movie's distributors has warned that the litigation could wreck the movie's political message by preventing it from impacting viewers in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential campaign.

While it’s too early to say how creationism will figure into the presidential race, the political impact of “Expelled” can be seen more directly in state legislatures, with a rash of new legislation challenging science education in public high schools. “I think Expelled definitely has played a role,” said ID-advocate Casey Luskin of Discovery Institute.

According to the National Center for Science Education, anti-evolution bills were recently introduced in Florida, Missouri, and Alabama, but the legislative sessions in those states ended before the bills could pass. Versions in South Carolina and Michigan also appear to be stalled for now. But a bill in Louisiana to undermine classroom teaching on the topics of “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” was passed unanimously in the state Senate and has already passed through a committee in the House.

The major claim of “Expelled” is that scientists working to provide some—any—legitimacy to Intelligent Design are facing persecution. The stories told in the movie don’t seem to pan out, but as Stein and company are surely aware, the debate over creationism is not taking place at research universities but at school boards, state legislatures, and public high school science classes. A newly published survey of high school teachers found that 25 percent address creationism or Intelligent Design in the classroom, and 12 percent call creationism a “valid scientific alternative” to evolution. Ben Stein’s rants about Nazis seem unlikely to chance the basic course of scientific inquiry into the natural world, but the legacy of “Expelled” may be bills, like Louisiana’s, to put the supernatural world into the science classroom.

Ben Stein’s anti-evolution attack film, “Expelled,” has finally arrived, grossing $3 million over the weekend, thanks to a church-based roll-out by the marketers that brought you “The Passion of the Christ.” Critics have savaged the documentary—which claims widespread persecution of creationists in academia and warns of a direct link between the theory of evolution and the Holocaust—as a dishonest work of propaganda, but, not surprisingly, the movie has a lot of fans among the Religious Right.

“Expelled” has been promoted heavily in right-wing media this month. Stein appeared on Focus on the Family radio, where the movie received the “enthusiastic” endorsement of James Dobson. Producer Mark Mathis appeared on WallBuilders Live, the radio show of premier church-state integrationist David Barton, to discuss “the persecution of the many by an elite few.” Rush Limbaugh exuberantly promoted it on his show; apparently, the movie taught him that “Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God.”

Stein was also interviewed by the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow, while executive producer Logan Craft hit WorldNetDaily. Baptist Press, the official outlet of the Southern Baptist Convention, featured an op-ed by Stein and a series of articles pushing the film. The producers gave a private screening to Brent Bozell of the far-right Media Research Center. (He loved it.)

“Expelled” is also featured by the late D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries, which offers its own product line equating Darwin and Hitler. While some “Expelled” cheerleaders express sympathy for the “Intelligent Design” advocates who have been “persecuted” supposedly (the National Center for Science Education has their realistic back-stories here), most on the Right seem to be especially enchanted by the film’s reliance on a half-baked linking of evolution to Nazism and Stalinism.

“Expelled,” wrote World magazine editor and faith-based initiatives architect Marvin Olasky, “rightly equates Darwinian stifling of free speech with the Communist attempt to enslave millions behind the Berlin Wall.”

The real question is: Did Darwinism bulwark Hitlerian hatred by providing a scientific rationale for killing those considered less fit in the struggle for survival?

The answer to that question is an unambiguous yes.

Richard Weikart of the “Intelligent Design” group, the Discovery Institute, defended the Darwin-Hitler connection as critical: “[W]hat is most objectionable about the Nazis' worldview? Isn't it that they had no respect for human life?” Weikart, who wrote a book entitled “From Darwin to Hitler,” added, “the Nazis' devaluing of human life derived from Darwinian ideology....”

Gary DeMar of American Vision was so inspired he branched out on his own, linking evolution to the fundamentalist polygamist cult that’s been in the news recently.

Given the worldview shift that has taken place in America, none of this is of any consequence. Evolutionary and atheistic assumptions are standard worldview thinking in every public school classroom in America. So then, why is it wrong with having forced sex with young girls? It’s evolution in action. …

The secularists should be proud of what these polygamists are doing. They are confirming the evolutionary thesis of Dawkins and his selfish gene hypothesis.

From the Miami Herald: "In the latest evolution battle, pop-culture figure Ben Stein will show his new documentary challenging mainstream science to Florida lawmakers Wednesday as they consider legislation that makes it easier for teachers to question Darwin's theory in science classes. The legislation, like Stein's documentary called 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,' has been bashed by critics as a front for advancing the agenda of biblical creationists who want to sneak religious teachings into the classrooms."

As we noted earlier this month, Ben Stein—of Richard Nixon and “Ferris Bueller” fame—is starring in an anti-evolution documentary called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” While the movie isn’t set to be released until February, scientists are already accusing its producers of dishonesty—and not for claiming that “Intelligent Design” creationism is a valid scientific theory. As various outlets are reporting, several scientists well known for refuting anti-evolution activists say the producers for the film hid their agenda, portraying the project innocently as “Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion” (still listed on the web site of the supposed production company).

From the New York Times:

If he had known the film’s premise, Dr. Dawkins said in an e-mail message, he would never have appeared in it. “At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front,” he said.

Eugenie C. Scott, a physical anthropologist who heads the National Center for Science Education, said she agreed to be filmed after receiving what she described as a deceptive invitation.

“I have certainly been taped by people and appeared in productions where people’s views are different than mine, and that’s fine,” Dr. Scott said, adding that she would have appeared in the film anyway. “I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren’t.” …

Walt Ruloff, a producer and partner in Premise Media [producer of “Expelled”], also denied that there was any deception. Mr. Ruloff said in a telephone interview that Rampant Films [which approached the scientists as producers of “Crossroads”] was a Premise subsidiary, and that the movie’s title was changed on the advice of marketing experts, something he said was routine in filmmaking. …

Another scientist who was, P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, said the film’s producers had misrepresented its purpose, but said he would have agreed to an interview anyway. But, he said in a posting on The Panda’s Thumb Web site, he would have made a “more aggressive” attack on the claims of the movie.

As for Stein, who rails in the movie against the scientific establishment’s supposed unsavory suppression of creationism, he claims innocence, adding that if he had his druthers, the movie would be called “From Darwin to Hitler”—an homage, perhaps, to the late televangelist D. James Kennedy.

Ben Stein, the Nixon speechwriter immortalized by his acting role as a boring schoolteacher in the 1986 movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is returning to movie academia in a documentary about “Intelligent Design” creationism. “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” sets out to expose what Stein calls “widespread suppression and entrenched discrimination that is spreading in our institutions, laboratories and most importantly, in our classrooms” in the form of the general rejection of ID—an outgrowth of creation science based on the premise that life is so complex it must have been created by God directly rather than through an evolutionary process—as a valid scientific theory.

“Expelled” paints ID advocates as the “rebels” of a “new scientific movement” doing battle against atheists and a world without morality. Like an earlier video produced by the late D. James Kennedy, “Expelled” attempts to link Darwin’s theory of evolution with Hitler and Nazi Germany; the film will feature shots of concentration camps to make that point.

While “Expelled” isn’t likely to advance acceptance of “scientific” study of the supernatural or move ID from the scholarly fringe, it will probably find a welcome audience among anti-evolution activists who look to ID as a back-door way to put creationism back in schools. The marketer who helped make “The Passion of the Christ” a blockbuster by promoting directly through churches is hoping to work the same magic on “Expelled,” so the film’s makers can hope for a constituency reenergized to engage the political debate, if not the scientific debate. That, after all, is the point of ID.