Natural Science Forum / Physics / Particle Physics / April 2008

They don't even try to make an argument, they simply make a bunch of
silly claims, flash pictures of Nazi war atrocities and think it'll
convince anyone.

Of course, now they're facing a lawsuit if they don't recut their movie
before it's released, so it just keeps getting better and better.

John Duncan Yoyo <john-duncan-yoyo@cox.net> wrote:

Lying for Jesus?
by Richard Dawkins
The blogs are ringing with ridicule. Mark Mathis, duplicitous producer of the
much hyped film Expelled, shot himself in the foot so spectacularly that the
phrase might have been invented for him. Goals don't come more own than this.
How is it possible that a man who makes his living from partisan propaganda
could hand so stunning a propaganda coup to his opponents? Hand it to them on
a plate, so ignominiously and so UNNECESSARILY.

In writing this for RichardDawkins.net, I have assumed that our readers will
already be familiar with the facts of the case, from Pharyngula and the more
than 40 other blogs that have picked up the story and are listed at
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/03/pz_myers_expelled_gains_sainth.php
For the same reason, I shall not discuss the main message of the film -- that
American creationist scientists are being victimized for their views --
except to say that it was very much NOT its main message when the film was
called Crossroads, and when I, together with PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott and
others, were conned into taking part.

Now, to the Good Friday Fiasco itself, Mathis' extraordinary and costly lapse
of judgment. Just think about it. His entire film is devoted to the notion
that American scientists are being hounded and expelled from their jobs
because of opinions that they hold. The film works hard at pressing (no,
belabouring with a sledgehammer) all the favourite hot buttons of free
speech, freedom of thought, the right of dissent, the right to be heard, the
right to discuss issues rather than suppress argument. These are the topics
that the film sets out to raise, with particular reference to evolution and
'intelligent design' (wittily described by someone as creationism in a cheap
tuxedo). In the course of this film, Mathis tricked a number of scientists,
including PZ Myers and me, into taking prominent parts in the film, and both
of us are handsomely thanked in the closing credits.

Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Mathis instructed some uniformed goon to
evict Myers while he was standing in line with his family to enter the
theatre, and threaten him with arrest if he didn't immediately leave the
premises. Did it not occur to Mathis -- what would occur any normally polite
and reasonable person -- that Myers, having played a leading role in the
film, might have been welcomed as an honoured guest to watch it? Or, more
cynically, did he not know that PZ is one of the country's most popular
bloggers, with a notoriously caustic wit, perfectly placed to set the whole
internet roaring with delighted and mocking laughter? I long ago realised
that Mathis was deceitful. I didn't know he was a bungling incompetent.

Not just incompetent at public relations, incompetent in his chosen
profession of film-making, for the film itself, as I discovered when I saw it
on Friday (and this genuinely surprised me) is dull, artless, amateurish, too
long, poorly constructed and utterly devoid of any style, wit or subtlety. It
bears all the hallmarks of a film-maker who knows nothing about the craft of
making films. I'll come to that in a moment.

But first, I should deal with some questions that have arisen over the Good
Friday Massacre of Mark Mathis' reputation (some commentators are publicly
wondering whether the film will ever be released, speculating that its
financial backers will pull out for fear of being tarnished with some of the
ridicule?)

In a desperate effort to scrape some of the egg off their faces, the
creationist wingnuts are spinning the story to make it look as though PZ and
I were 'gatecrashers'. The ill-named 'Discovery' Institute heads its web
article, "Richard Dawkins, World Famous Darwinist, Stoops to Gate-crashing
Expelled." The article says that I "apparently acknowledged that I was not
invited". Mark Mathis himself said something similar about PZ in the Q & A
after the showing, when I publicly challenged him to explain why he had
expelled him, claiming that this performance was by invitation only, and PZ
had not been invited. But, as many commentators have pointed out, this was
most certainly not an invitation-only affair. The way to get into this
showing of the film was simply to go on the Internet and apply. This was
exactly what PZ did. He went on the Web and put his name down for a place at
the showing, just like everybody else, including several others from the
American Atheists annual conference in Minneapolis. Not a man to hide behind
a false name or false beard, PZ openly sported his own. Like many other
people, including his daughter and Kristine Harley (see her Amused Muse
website), PZ took advantage of the generous offer to let him book guests in
as well, and then kindly invited me to be one of them. There was no request
to give the names of guests, and no machinery to do so, which was why my name
did not appear on the list.

Many people have wondered why, if PZ was expelled, I managed to get in. This
has been adduced as further evidence of Mathis' bungling incompetence, but I
think that is unfair. It was easy for Mathis to spot PZ Myers' name on the
list of those registering in advance. Like all guests, my name was not on any
list, and therefore Mathis didn't spot me. So I think he can be absolved of
stupidity in not spotting me. But convicted of extreme stupidity in expelling
PZ when he spotted him. What was he afraid of? What did he think PZ would do,
open fire with a Kalashnikov? Now that I think about it, that would have been
all-of-a-piece with the overblown paranoia displayed throughout the film
itself.

The whole tone of the film is whiny, paranoid -- pathetic really. The
narrator is somebody called Ben Stein. I had not heard of him, but apparently
he is well known to Americans, for it is hard to see why else he would have
been chosen to front the film. He certainly can't have been chosen for his
knowledge of science, nor his powers of logical reasoning, nor his box office
appeal (heavens, no), and his speaking voice is an irritating, nasal drawl,
innocent of charm and of consonants. I suppose that makes it a good voice for
conveying the whingeing paranoia that I referred to, so maybe that was
qualification enough.

Now, to the film itself. What a shoddy, second-rate piece of work. A
favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'.
Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating
every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The
Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The
joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a
picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal. Mathis' film is positively
barking with Lord Privy Seals. We get an otherwise pointless cut to Nikita
Krushchev hammering the table (to illustrate something like 'emotional
outburst'). There are similarly clunking and artless cuts to a guillotine,
fist fights, and above all to the Berlin wall and Nazi gas chambers and
concentration camps.

The alleged association between Darwinism and Nazism is harped on for what
seems like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage. We are supposed to
believe that Hitler was influenced by Darwin. Hitler was ignorant and bonkers
enough for his hideous mind to have imbibed some sort of garbled
misunderstanding of Darwin (along with his very ungarbled understanding of
the anti-semitism of Martin Luther, and of his own never-renounced Roman
Catholic religion) but it is hardly Darwin's fault if he did. My own view,
frequently expressed (for example in the The Selfish Gene and especially in
the title chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) is that there are two reasons why we
need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most
important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all
life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to
organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a
passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct
a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of
looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical
care (very un-Darwinian). It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to
derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. Stein (or whoever wrote his script for him)
is implying that Hitler committed that fallacy with respect to Darwinism. If
we look at more recent history, the closest representatives you'll find to
Darwinian politics are uncompassionate conservatives like Margaret Thatcher,
George W Bush, or Ben Stein's own hero, Richard Nixon. Maybe all these
people, along with the Social Darwinists from Herbert Spencer to John D
Rockefeller, committed the is/ought fallacy and justified their unpleasant
social views by invoking garbled Darwinism. Anyone who thinks that has any
bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity of Darwin's theory of evolution is
either an unreasoning fool or a cynical manipulator of unreasoning fools. I
will not speculate as to which category includes Ben Stein and Mark Mathis.

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.

More sinister than the artless Lord Privy Seals, and the self-indulgent and
wholly illicit playing of the Nazi trump card, the film goes shamelessly for
cheap laughs at the expense of scientists and scholars who are making honest
attempts to explain difficult points. Cheap laughs that could only be raised
in an audience of scientific ignoramuses (and here Mathis' propaganda
instincts cannot be faulted: he certainly knows his target audience). One
example is the treatment of the philosopher Michael Ruse: a decent man,
bluff, bearded, articulate, and with a genuine and sincere desire to explain
difficult ideas clearly. Stein asked Ruse how life originated. Ruse's
immediate impulse (as mine would have been) was to launch into an honest
effort to explain a difficult scientific idea. He began by saying that he
doesn't know how life originated, and nor does anybody else. At this point in
his interview, Ruse probably had no notion that his interlocuter had a
completely different agenda to promote, with no hint of sincerity to balance
his own. Ruse patiently explained that the origin of life (nothing to do with
the Darwinian theory itself but the necessary precursor of Darwinian
evolution) is an interesting and unsolved mystery, one that scientists are
actively working on. By way of example, Ruse could have chosen any of a
number of current theories. He chose just one (it would have taken too long
to explain them all) purely as an illustration of the kind of properties such
a theory must have. He happened to choose the theory proposed by the Scottish
chemist Graham Cairns-Smith, that organic life was preceded by a strange and
intriguing world of replicating patterns on the surfaces of crystals in
inorganic clays. At no time did Ruse say he believed the Cairns-Smith theory,
only that it was the KIND of theory that scientists are actively examining,
as a CANDIDATE for the origin of evolution. Stein just loved it. Mud! MUD!
The sarcasm in his grating, nasal voice was palpable. Maybe this was when
Ruse realised that he had been had. Certainly it was at this point that he
started to show signs of exasperation, although he may still have thought
that Stein was merely stupid, rather than pursuing a malevolent and
clandestine agenda. Stein kept returning, throughout the film, to the phrase
"on the backs of crystals", and the sycophantic audience in the Minneapolis
cinema dutifully tittered every time.

Another example. Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether
I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design
might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself
the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give
ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been
feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates
of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking
about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified
intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this
is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist
creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their
way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to
accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God,
this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could
for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like
Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was
charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking
enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could
conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another
planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi
tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the
highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible
for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to
have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to
quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE
explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by
intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was
itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be
terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of
the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just
spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole
point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by
natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can
ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes
everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the
universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and
again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may
not persuade you. That is not my concern here. 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 emphaticaly 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." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where
we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction
movie with some kind of android figure - that may have been used in the
service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the
partisan audience).

Enough on the film itself. Quite apart from anything else, it is drearily
boring, the tedium exacerbated by the grating monotony of Stein's voice. At
the end, Mathis came on the stage to answer questions. He had of course taken
the precaution of removing the one individual whom he apparently saw as a
likely source of knowledgeable questions, Professor Myers. He must have been
surprised when I stood up and asked him to explain why he had expelled PZ,
given that the film was an attack on such expulsions, and given that the
film's acknowledgments had thanked PZ for his role in the film. Mathis
trotted out the lie that Myers had been excluded because he was not invited.
This seemed to satisfy the loyal audience, even though they presumably knew
perfectly well that they hadn't been invited either, and that they, like PZ,
had simply booked their seats on the Internet. I pursued the matter until the
audience's hostile demeanour persuaded me that there was no point in
continuing. The point was made to all whose minds were not completely blinded
by religious zeal.

The New York Times picked up the story, and caught Mathis in the act of
perpetrating yet another piece of dubious spin-doctoring.

   Mark Mathis, a producer of the film who attended the screening, said that
"of course" he had recognized Dr. Dawkins, but allowed him to attend because
"he has handled himself fairly honorably, he is a guest in our country and I
had to presume he had flown a long way to see the film."

As I said before, Mathis almost certainly detected Myers' name on the list of
those who signed up on the Internet. Since my name was not on that list, it
is highly likely that Mathis didn't spot me until the moment I stood up in
the Question session, when it was too late to expel me. So all that stuff
about allowing me to attend because I have handled myself fairly honourably
is almost certainly dishonourable spinning. As for the implication that I
might have flown all the way from England to see his disreputable film, the
very idea is as ludicrous as the film itself. Like PZ Myers, I was in
Minneapolis for the conference of the American Atheists.

Josh Timonen and Kristine Harley took up the cudgels. Josh drew attention to
the digraceful victimization of scientists espousing the Stork Theory of
reproduction, by hardline members of the 'Sex Theory' establishment. And
Kristine asked Mathis to explain what had become of a film called Crossroads
which had mysteriously morphed itself into Expelled. The import of her
question was the widely known fact, which I have already mentioned, that PZ
and I had been tricked into participating in Crossroads without ever being
told that the true purpose of the film was the one conveyed by the later
title Expelled -- the alleged expulsion of creationists from universities.
Mathis said that it was common practice for films under production to have
working titles, which later change in the final version. That is indeed true.
However, yet again, Mathis shows himself up as a wilfull deceiver. As
Kristine herself said on her blog (http://amused-muse.blogspot.com/):

   It would appear that Expelled's producer Mark Mathis was not being
truthful when he told me tonight that Crossroads was a 'working title' for
the film Expelled. As Wesley Elsberry points out, the domain for Expelled was
purchased before most, if not all, of the interviews were conducted -- and
yet Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, PZ Myers, and others were told they were
being interviewed for a film called Crossroads.

   Mr. Mark Mathis, do you want to come here and explain yourself?

Could Mathis have been sincere when he originally told PZ and me the film was
an honest attempt to examine evolution and intelligent design? The evidence
that they had already purchased the Expelled domain name argues against this.
Certainly Mathis' friendly demeanour disarmed me into cooperating with him --
indeed, I went out of my way to HELP him on his visit to Britain -- in a way
that I never would have if I had had the slightest suspicion that his outfit
was in fact a creationist front. I may have misremembered the details of our
exchanges, by eMail and by telephone, but I vividly remember his reassuring
me, over the telephone, that he was on the side of science, and he made no
attempt to distance himself from my sarcastic jokes about 'Intelligent
Design'. I am reluctantly driven to wonder whether he is an inveterate liar,
as well as a dreadful film-maker. Yet another example of Lying for Jesus?

It's delicious that the tactic isn't exclusive to leftists?  Well,
whatever floats your boat, I guess.  Of course... that's what I would
have expected; both leftist and rightist trying to load the dice.
Not "delicious", more "yawn, SOP for ideologues".  Or... demagogues?
Or both demagogues and republigogues? Some other type of gogue?  
Eh, whatever.  SOP for the hot air set of whatever persuasion.

Wayne Throop   throopw@sheol.org   http://sheol.org/throopw

 Whereas the blatant hypocrisy of wingnuts such as yourself, who froth
about Moore's tactics, and yet cheer on Stein's adoption of them, is not
at all surprising to me.  You have no objection whatsoever to dishonest
debating tactics - so long as the person using them is furthering *your*
beliefs.

 Toodles,
   Biff