Okay, we no longer require a demonstration that ID is simply Creationism 2.0, a repackaged delux edition stripped of the all too explicit anthropomorphic and Christocentric baggage that hampered its predacessor. (Or at least that’s what it says on the box, which as we have seen is no guarantee of actual performance regarding its intended goals.) However, the ID crowd seems psychotically determined to provide yet more evidence in that direction. Witness the latest from the disinforming rodents at Answers in Genesis about a meeting with ID’s newest public face, Ben Stein, hilariously mislabeled as a “meeting of the minds”.
You just gotta love the caption underneath a photo of Ben Stein and YEC huckster Ken Ham:
“On Tuesday, Ben and Ken met at a special preview showing of Ben’s eye-opening and highly entertaining film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. A full review of the Expelled film will appear on this website later this month.”
Yep, it certainly is “eye-opening”, which is why they have to exercise extraordinary caution about which eyes can see the movie and which eyes are prohibited. But I guess that such a caption works better for them than “a has-been celebrity prostitute and a creationist fraudster meet to discuss how a propaganda flick can assist in the furtherance of their mutual anti-science agenda.”
But as other, bigger bloggers out there have already noted, this is where it just gets bad:
“Expelled is hosted by the brilliant Ben Stein, actor/economist/lawyer/presidential speechwriter/science observer—a 21st-century Einsteinian figure.”
Wow, you’d think that to qualify as an “Einsteinian figure” you’d at least have to make a significant contribution to a scientific field. As far as economics goes, Ben Stein doesn’t seem to be a remarkable figure, as his contribution has mostly been as a yet another Republican Party flak in the right-wing echo-chamber. The bar has certainly been lowered, at least among the creobots.
March 14, 2008 at 8:40 am
For those of you reading this blog who think that Ben Stein was in any way the motivating force behind this movie, please reconsider.
From the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention Texan interview with Logan Craft (executive producer of Expelled):
http://www.sbtexan.com/default.asp?action=article&aid=5533&issue=2/4/2008
TEXAN: How did Ben Stein come to be involved in the film?
CRAFT: Well, John (Sullivan, producer of Expelled) had a real insight, we believe, into the necessity to have a person, first of all, who wasn’t overtly Christian or overtly religious…
Ben Stein is a hack!
This film is a manufactured argument, cleverly crafted to advance a conservative christian agenda. ID at this point, after almost 20 years and millions of dollars tossed at it by the Discovery Institute, is still merely a vague idea. It has not yet even been fleshed out into a valid scientific hypothesis, and certainly hasn’t developed into a viable or testable theory.
So at this point, the ID/creationist movement is merely a well-funded public relations effort trying to rally public support by falsely decrying “There is no Freedom of Speech!”, and promoting “science/evolution = atheists = Naziism”, rather than offering any positive evidence for why ID should even be considered as science.
To see what people who have seen the movie are saying, go to
http://www.expelledexposed.com
“Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.”
—Isaac Asimov
March 14, 2008 at 12:29 pm
“Ben Stein, … a 21st-century Einsteinian figure.”
Poor Albert, he must be spinning in his grave especially with today being his birthday.