Filmed for creationist DVD

Yesterday I spent a few hours being filmed in an interview for a DVD being put out by Creationist Ministries International, a 20-year retrospective on the 1988 debate at the University of New South Wales between Duane Gish and Ian Plimer. I went back and forth a few times about whether I should do it, finally concluding that it would be worthwhile.

I have no fear of an "Expelled"-like distortion in this case--the questions were provided to me in advance, and I negotiated the terms of the release agreement and had my attorney review it. I have the right to use the full footage myself (to put on YouTube or otherwise distribute or broadcast), so if I were to find myself misrepresented through creative editing (which I don't believe will happen), I would be able to demonstrate it.

My involvement was requested because of the role I played in criticizing Plimer and certain of the Australian Skeptics for misrepresentations of the creationists, which I wrote about first in the article "Some Failures of Organized Skepticism" in The Arizona Skeptic, and later in "How Not to Argue with Creationists" in the Creation/Evolution journal, "How Not to Respond to Criticism" which is available online through the talkorigins.org website, and in my review of Plimer's book Telling Lies for God, on my website. In preparation for the interview, I dug out my file folders regarding these articles, which amounts to a stack of paper
about six inches thick. Reviewing the files, I re-read some of the correspondence I had with Mark Plummer, then president of the Victoria Branch of the Australian Skeptics, and former executive director of CSICOP (now CSI). At some point, I should put some of that stuff online--it was quite unbelievable.

I thought it went pretty well, though it took me several takes to get through some of the questions, and I didn't say everything I wanted to say. The one item that I kick myself for forgetting to say was to emphasize the point that Duane Gish, debater for young-earth creationism, has two things that he always refuses to debate--the age of the earth and flood geology. Those also happen to be the two main areas of positive claims that make up young-earth creationism, which he rules out of court at the start of every debate.

The interviewer, Tim, is a CMI supporter who once applied for a job with Answers in Genesis and is now happy that he didn't get it, since he feels he was deceived by them about their split from CMI. The cameraman, Mike, who was hired for this job, was also a Christian, but didn't seem to be a young-earth creationist. He frequently films both interviews and outdoor nature footage, often for science documentaries, and he expressed his love for knowledge and science. We had an interesting discussion after the interview about creationism, Christianity, and science.

Tim took the position that young-earth creationism is an essential part of Christianity, because God must have been able to communicate his word accurately in the first place, because Jesus endorsed the truth of Genesis, and because death before the Fall in Eden would imply that God didn't create a perfect universe. He also holds the position that only "operational science" is valid science--that which can take place in the laboratory and be "directly observed" (which philosophers of science know is very little, since instrument-assisted and even naked-eye observation is "theory-laden"). (Tim's view of science, where it came from, and what's wrong with it is the subject of Christopher Toumey's excellent book, God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World.) I pointed out to him that that's the kind of choice--young-earth creationism or atheism--that helped drive me to atheism.

Mike, by contrast, didn't think young-earth creationism was essential to Christianity, but that the discoveries of science open more possibilities for religious interpretation. Today, I agree with Mike--given what I know about religions and how they work, Christianity is not defined solely in terms of the content of the Bible, even for evangelical Christians. Fundamentalism as it exists today didn't exist until the early twentieth century. And even within evangelical Christianity, there are those who have argued very forcefully against young-earth creationism (I pulled out my copy of Daniel Wonderly's Neglect of Geologic Data: Sedimentary Strata Compared With Young Earth from the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, and could have also pointed to Davis Young and Howard Van Till's Science Held Hostage: What's Wrong with Creation Science and Evolutionism, or pointed to Mike Beidler's blog, "The Creation of an Evolutionist").

I think it's interesting that if all Christians took Tim's viewpoint rather than Mike's, there would probably be a lot more atheists and a lot fewer Christians.

UPDATE (January 1, 2009): I wrote up my initial reaction to the completed documentary here, and you can view the video yourself here.

Expelled features anti-Semitic anti-Darwinist

John Lynch has discovered an unintentional irony in "Expelled." While the movie tries to argue that Darwinism led to Hitler, one of the anti-Darwinists interviewed in the film, Maciej Giertych, also happens to be an old-fashioned anti-Semite who thinks that Jews intentionally create ghettos to live in, are unethical swindlers who do not have any moral respect for the law, and who move to rich countries in order to exploit them. One commenter points out that Giertych has also praised Spain's fascist leader Francisco Franco (who is still dead). Another observes that Giertych is, in at least a small way, a Holocaust denier, denying that gentile Poles carried out the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941.

Giertych has also been published by Answers in Genesis' Creation magazine, in 1995, and is a signatory to the Discovery Institute's "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism" statement.

Clearly, racism does not require a belief in evolution.

Ben Stein proves "Expelled" producers lied

Wesley Elsberry points out that Ben Stein has reported in an interview that he was approached for the "Expelled" project, described more or less as it finally came to be, back in 2006. Part of the pitch was that he was shown XVIVO's "Inner Life of the Cell" video.

Yet in April 2007 (a month after the "expelledthemovie.com" domain was registered), Mark Mathis obtained the cooperation of Genie Scott, P.Z. Myers, and other participants by pitching the nonexistent film "Crossroads," about the intersection of science and religion, from "Rampant Films," which had an innocuous website and an address at an empty apartment complex in Los Angeles.

Stein's interview provides further evidence that "Crossroads" was a dishonest subterfuge and that the "Expelled" crowd fully intended to use XVIVO's film in their movie and did not commission their copy until after William Dembski was sent a cease and desist notice in September 2007, delaying the film's release from February to April.

See Wesley's Austringer blog for more details.

Expelled's animator asked to have his name removed

ERV reports that Mike Edmondson, who was listed as the animator for "Expelled," has left his employment with Premise Media and asked to have his name removed from their website. (UPDATE: It looks like Edmondson probably was responsible for the "Beware the Believers" YouTube video, but not the ripoff of the XVIVO film. Good for him for cutting ties with these liars and thieves.) (UPDATE April 21, 2008: It's been confirmed that Edmondson made "Beware the Believers.")

She also points out that it is William Dembski who observed that "Expelled"'s producers set aside budget for copyright infringement lawsuits.

And that Jonathan Wells is helping with the foot bullets by claiming that "Expelled" produced their version of the XVIVO film in 3 months with one guy (where it took XVIVO a team of people 14 months).

Looks like ERV is the blog to watch on this issue. She's also the one who documented that William Dembski knew well that he was violating XVIVO's copyright.

David Bolinsky on "Expelled" and Dembski's copyright infringement

At Richard Dawkins' blog, David Bolinsky of XVIVO explains the extent of the copyright infringement and reveals a previous copyright infringement action against William Dembski:

To the anti-ID community which is giving XVIVO support in our ideological battle against the microcephalic apostates of "Intelligent Design":

XVIVO created The Inner Life of the Cell for Harvard, through fourteen months of painstaking examination of how a myriad of systems, functional structures and proteins in a cell, could be depicted in a sweeping panoramic style of animation, reminiscent of cinema, that fundamentally raised the bar on the visualization of molecular and cellular biology for undergraduate students. In depicting what we did, other than merely maintaining the intent of the syllabus, we needed to edit like mad. A cell has billions of molecules, millions of active functional proteins and tens of thousands of structural elements separating, sequestering and joining compartments and systems into a functional whole. An initial foundational decision process of our creative vision, consisted of editing out 95% of the contents of our cell in order to gain, for our virtual camera, a vista to visualize what elements we left in. The decisions we made blended aesthetics with science. They were not made lightly, nor were they made without extensive consultation with researchers at Harvard, and an extensive body of literature, including protein data libraries and new findings by Harvard researchers.

Given the vast number of structures to be removed, and given the structures remaining "on camera", whose positioning and relationships, both aesthetic and functional, needed to remain true to the function and beauty of molecular biology, it is inconceivable, mathematically, that the animator hired by EXPELLED's producers, independently and randomly came up with the same identical actin filament mesh XVIVO depicted in one scene, which had never before been rendered anywhere in 3D! It is astonishing that among well over a dozen functional kinesins from which an animator might choose, we both chose the same configuration of kinesin, pulling the same protein-studded vesicle, on the same microtubule! Can YOU believe we coincidentally picked the same camera angles and left in the same specific structures in the background, positioned with the same composition? Equally astonishing is the "Intellgent Design" treatment of these and other proteins surfaces, which XVIVO derived using procedural iso-surface skinning of the PDB cloud data of our proteins' atom placement. There are an infinite number of possble "correct" solutions to that problem.

Coincidence? Given their "access to the same literature" we had, where Graham Johnson at Scripps so brilliantly worked out the real motion of kinesins, I am simply blown away that the "Intelligent Design" animators slavishly made the hands of their kenesins move exactly as we did, even though we intentionally left out the stochastic Brownian motion which actually characterizes the tractive force and periodic pedicle placement of these tiny motivators. We simply did not have the time or budget to render these, and a dozen other details, to the level of insanity we would like to have done! This was, after all, an underfunded proof-of-concept piece. The cellular biology that serves as "filler" material, between scenes copied from Inner Life, is riddled with biological errors. Imagine "Intelligent Design's" depiction of protein synthesis without ribosomes!

To Mr. Dembski: The only reason I am involved in this discussion is because I do not want the reputation of my company, hard-earned as it is, to be sullied by even oblique affiliation to your sort of smarmy ethics, if only through works of ours, purloined to fit your agenda. Last year you were charging colleges thousands of dollars to give lectures showing a copy of The Inner Life of the Cell, you claimed you "found somewhere", with Harvard's and XVIVO's credits stripped out and the copyright notice removed (which is in itself a felony) and a creationist voice-over pasted on over our music (yes, I have a recording of your lecture). Harvard slapped you down for that, and yes there is a paper trail. One can only assume that had we not taken notice then, we would be debating The Inner Life of the Cell being used in EXPELLED, instead of a copy. You have enough of a colorful history that Harvard, in its wisdom, decided to 'swat the gnat' with as little fuss as possible. Imagine our surprise earlier this month, to see our work copied in a movie trailer for EXPELLED! And you are in the movie too! Not quite a star, but brown dwarfs are cool. XVIVO has no intention of engaging alone, in asymmetrical fighting against an ideological entity with orders of magnitude more resources than we have. That might make great theater, but would resemble a hugely expensive game of whack-a-ID. Boring!

It makes me happy, though, that you decided to implicate your friends in print, on your blog (http://www.uncommondescent.com/legal/expelled-plagiarizing-harvard/#comment-229619), in what is legally, malignant infringement, since you no had doubt discussed with EXPELLED's producers, Harvard's previous legal infringement action against you, the Discovery Institute, where you are a fellow and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where you teach. Once we uncover the EXPELLED animation dollar trail, and bring it to light, we will have even more fun. The sublimely ridiculous claim that EXPELLED uses completely original animation, in light of copying our work so closely that a budget was reserved to pay for an infringement suit by Harvard, is delicious! Why should I try to take you guys down when you are doing such a splendid job yourselves? For free! So go ahead and release your movie. Just keep track of how many tickets you sell. We may just find that data valuable, too.

David Bolinsky

For more on David Bolinksy and the animation see:

(http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/147)

UPDATE (April 12, 2008): P.Z. Myers comments. Blake Stacey also has a nice post summarizing the copyright infringement issue.

UPDATE (April 19, 2008): The footage copied from XVIVO was apparently removed before the film's public release yesterday.

The torture team

An article by Philippe Sands in Vanity Fair sets out the evidence that the legal framework set out to justify aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay also caused the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that those responsible are guilty of war crimes. Ironically, the actions the Bush has taken to guarantee immunity from prosecution for these actions makes the case stronger for international war crimes prosecution, meaning that if any of these responsible individuals sets foot outside of the U.S., they could be at risk of seeing justice done.

(Via The Daily Doubter.)

"Expelled" producer tells Catholics what they believe

"Expelled" producer Mark Mathis says that Christians who believe in evolution were intentionally excluded from the film because they "would have confused the film unnecessarily." (Don't confuse people with the truth!) He goes on to say that "the form of Catholicism that Ken Miller [biology professor at Brown University and co-author of a popular biology textbook] accepts and practices is, is nowhere near the form of Catholicism that is followed by Catholics who are members of the Catholic church, who believe in Catholic doctrine."

Mathis, who is not a Catholic, is apparently unaware that Miller's view of evolution is consistent with the official position of the Catholic Church as set forth by both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. The Catholic Church's position on evolution has been that it's not in conflict with Christianity, since Pope Pius XII.

Mathis should also take a look at the NCSE's Voices for Evolution, where he'll find that a lot of other Christian sects similarly have no problem with evolution.

"Expelled" and its producers seem to want to force a false dilemma of a choice between Christianity or evolution, just as the young-earth creationists do. They don't seem to realize that this kind of forced choice is one which will make any honest, inquiring mind who accepts the false dilemma to choose against Christianity. J.P. Hunt, a student in Ray Baird's 1980 "balanced treatment" class on creationism and evolution at Emma C. Smith Elementary School in Livermore, California, said on the 1982 PBS show "Creation vs. Evolution: Battle in the Classroom":

Someone that I know has become an atheist because of this class, because the creationist theory was so stupid, he thought. Well, if religion requires me to believe this, then I don't want to have any part of it.

I don't find this too objectionable as a consequence, personally. Learning that I was lied to by young-earth creationists was a significant factor in my abandonment of creationism, then Christianity, and then theism. The rampant dishonesty of the "Expelled" crowd will no doubt serve the same effect for others like me, and cause them to look to see if they've been similarly lied to about other things. Odds are, they will find that they have.

(Via Stranger Fruit.)

Matthew LaClair's speech from Freethought Today

I'm sorry that I just came across this excellent speech by Matthew LaClair recounting his experiences with David Paszkiewicz which was published in Freethought Today in October 2007, reprinted by the Friendly Atheist blog on January 6, 2008. It's probably the best concise summary of what happened and the subsequent events.

Time magazine reviews "Expelled"

Another negative review for the film, by Jeffrey Kluger. He specifically calls out the film for dishonesty:

The man made famous by Ferris Bueller, however, quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't--and it didn't. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing. More dishonestly, Stein employs the common dodge of enumerating all the admittedly unanswered questions in evolutionary theory and using this to refute the whole idea. But all scientific knowledge is built this way. A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.

It's in the film's final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and--wait for it--Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it's claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler's killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We've always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.

Kruger also criticizes Myers and Dawkins:

In fairness to Stein, his opponents have hardly covered themselves in glory. Evolutionary biologists and social commentators have lately taken to answering the claims of intelligent-design boosters not with clear-eyed scientific empiricism but with sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism. Biologist P.Z. Myers, for example, tells Stein that religion ought to be seen as little more than a soothing pastime, a bit like knitting. Books such as Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion often read like pure taunting, as when Hitchens pettily and pointedly types God as lowercase god. Tautology as typography is not the stuff of deep thought. Neither, alas, is Expelled.

Looks like a sub-50% rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a foregone conclusion. I see that rottentomatoes.com has a new April 18 film on the list, Jenna Jameson's first non-porn film, "Zombie Strippers." "Expelled" is still not on the list. Which will have the bigger opening weekend box office take?

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (currently with a 93% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes) will most likely be the box office leader. "Forbidden Kingdom" with Jackie Chan and Jet Li may also do well. Al Pacino in "88 Minutes," though it looks like a weak offering, is likely to have greater box office draw than "Expelled." Likewise for Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood in "Life Before Her Eyes." Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary, "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?", with a mere 33% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, is something "Expelled" needs to beat if there's really any hope of it making a mark on the top box office numbers for documentaries, as some of its advocates have claimed it will. (I predict it won't get into the top ten documentaries by box office, let alone the top three as the delusional advocate I just linked to seems to think.)

UPDATE (April 12, 2008): P.Z. Myers responds to the criticism directed at him by the Time reviewer.

Shermer and Scientific American review "Expelled"

Scientific American:

...it seems a safe bet that the producers hope a whipping from us would be useful for publicity: further proof that any mention of ID outrages the close-minded establishment. (Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, "You can't handle the truth!") Knowing this, we could simply ignore the movie--which might also suit their purposes, come to think of it.

Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks--all recycled from previous pro-ID works--would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency.

Scientific American editor-in-chief John Rennie:

The most deplorable dishonesty of Expelled, however, is that it says evolution was one influence on the Holocaust without acknowledging any of the other major ones for context. Rankings of races and ethnic groups into a hierarchy long preceded Darwin and the theory of evolution, and were usually tied to the Christian philosophical notion of a “great chain of being.” The economic ruin of the Weimar Republic left many Germans itching to find someone to blame for their misfortune, and the Jews and other ethnic groups were convenient scapegoats. The roots of European anti-Semitism go back to the end of the Roman Empire. Organized attacks and local exterminations of the Jews were perpetrated during the Crusades and the Black Plague. The Russian empire committed many attacks on the Jews in the 19th and early 20th century, giving rise to the word “pogrom.” Profound anti-Semitism even pollutes the works of the father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, who reviled them in On the Jews and Their Lies and wrote, “We are at fault in not slaying them.” I don’t think Protestantism is accountable for the Holocaust, either, but whose ideas were most Lutheran Germans of the 1930s more familiar with: Darwin’s or Luther’s?

Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, a former Pepperdine University student, points out yet another piece of dishonesty in the film:

It was with some irony for me, then, that I saw Ben Stein's antievolution documentary film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens with the actor, game show host and speechwriter for Richard Nixon addressing a packed audience of adoring students at Pepperdine University, apparently falling for the same trap I did.

Actually they didn't. The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein's screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, associate provost for research and chair of natural science at Pepperdine, "the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus" but that "the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and a staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein's lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university." And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

(Via Pharyngula.)

UPDATE (April 11, 2008): Wesley Elsberry points out Jonathan Wells' inconsistent stance on peppered moths versus Pepperdine students.