A Faerie Tale

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, in a land much like ours, there lived a man named Big Science. Big Science lived in an ivory tower, atop the tallest mountain, where he would often gaze at the insignificant people below.

"Bah!" said Big Science. "Look at them all. Their concerns so unimportant, their little lives ever so small."

Big Science had always hated the people in the village. Many of them had ideas about why - perhaps he had a heart of coal, or wasn't held enough as a child. There were even whispered rumors that he had been tortured in a basement dungeon in the bleak and horrible kingdom of Gradlandia, but that is the subject for another story.

For years, Big Science and the townsfolk coexisted quietly, with him providing the townsfolk with wonders like antibiotics, electricity, and lycra pants. In exchange, the townsfolk would provide a small amount of money to keep Big Science happy, and keep him fed on a steady diet of ramen noodles and Mountain Dew.

One day, Big Science was looking down at the town in contempt, as he so often did, when he had a perfectly fiendish idea.

"Oh, the worms all down there, they spit in my face, with their simple devotion to their petty faiths. Praying to Jesus and Vishnu, to Thor and to Loki... I deserve admiration, not some hokey story."

So he schemed through the week, feverishly creating and discarding plans to destroy the little civilization of the townsfolk and crush any remaining traces of religion. Finally, on the seventh day, he had his plan.

"I'll start off with something so innocent and mild, that they've all descended from animals so wild. Their morality gone, they'll kill and they'll steal, and that's when I'll swoop in to seal the deal. I'll ban all talk of god, we'll start society anew, and if anyone questions me, well, then they're through."

So then he rose to the window, and bellowed his new laws down upon the land. If they wished to continue to have access to antibiotics, automobiles, and the ever-popular Village Idol, they would have to purge their town of any and all religion. He would be providing them with a new bible, On the Origin of Species. And, if any schoolteacher questioned him or so much as admitted to belief in the supernatural, they would be buried to their necks in a pit full of hot coals and cobras covered with razorblades, and bags full of acid-covered fire ants would be poured onto their heads.

As in any cultural revolution, there was some resistance, but they were quickly crushed by the Hammer of Science. And as time passed, the creeping fungus of secularism gradually began choking the kindness and decency out of the town. Without the Bible in schools, students had nothing keeping them from murdering each other. With the happy support of Big Science, horrible people began using Darwin as a justification to do whatever they wanted.

An oppressive shadow had fallen over the land. But all was not lost - a rag-tag band of rebels, led by a fearless former Nixon speechwriter set out to burn Big Science's ivory tower to the ground.

And this time, no amount of facts would be able to save him.

If you liked my little story, you must not have heard about the new movie Expelled. You see, to some people, that's not a fairy tale, it is an accurate account of scientific suppression and an century-long assault on goodness and morality by puppy-kicking grinchly atheist researchers. The movie is the latest in a long line of other creationist assaults on evolutionary biology. It follows in the the classic tradition of creationist assaults - since they can't do science, and evidence isn't exactly on their side, they try to convince people that evolution is responsible for everything from the Columbine shooting to the Holocaust.

Yes, I'm not kidding. The Holocaust. Argumentum ad Naziium, the last stop on the debate train to failure. Godwin's law on a massive scale.

I've been following the path of Expelled for a while now, from the start when they interviewed a number of famous atheist biologists under false pretenses. Not the most auspicious start for a film that's about suppression of inquiry.

The premise behind Expelled, besides the fact that evolution is evil, is that the scientific establishment (also referred to as "Big Science") had been actively persecuting advocates of intelligent design, aka Creationism Lite (none of the facts, all of the Jesus!) Their claims seem to stem mostly from the consistent smackdown they've received when attempting to pass their manure into public schools.

In the beginning of the movie, Ben Stein (the star of the flick, previously of Visine fame) is giving a speech to this extent to a packed auditorium of Pepperdine students. Well, to a packed auditorium containing three Pepperdine students and a boatload of extras, anyway. Be warned, this is probably the most intellectually honest part of the whole film.

The movie discusses several cases of "persecution," but two of them really exemplify the bullshit density in the film.

The first focuses on a man called Richard Sternberg. Sternberg used his position as (unpaid) editor at a tiny biological journal to slip in a paper that supported Intelligent Design. According to Sternberg, his life was ruined by sinister agents of Big Science soon after, getting him removed from the journal and fired from his unpaid research assistant position at the Smithsonian. What really happened was that Sternberg put in his resignation from the journal, and nothing at all happened to his position at the Smithsonian, save for him not showing up to work anymore.

The second is about a professor, Guillermo Gonzalez, who was allegedly denied tenure at a university because of his support for Creationism Lite. Tenure is a complicated decision, based on many things - for science, the two major things you have to have is money and publications. If your publication record isn't growing and your funding situation is stagnant, you don't have a chance in hell.

Fortunately, someone made a nice graph of Gonzalez's publication record, which is pretty clear - what did him in was his failure to continue being a productive scientist.

So, the main thesis of the movie - that science expels intelligent design proponents - is completely false.

One of the big arguments made by the ID crowd is that it isn't actually religious, that it's science. Well then, why didn't they interview Ken Miller or Francis Collins, famously religious evolutionary biologists? In the words of the producers:

[...] that somebody like Ken Miller is wrong. But I mean, you say he would have, his presence would have “confused the film.” The point is what, it would actually had, I mean, it would have, it would have considerably undercut the major point that is made, that really that belief in, in evolution obliges you not to believe in God, and to—

Ouch, that's got to hurt. The producer of your gretest propaganda piece to date admitting it's explicitly about religion? Damn.

Of course, this is right in line with the rest of the film. If one word can be used to describe it other than "dishonest," it would have to be "incompetent."

For example - PZ Myers, who runs the outspokenly atheist/biological blog Pharyngula signed up online to see a screening of the movie in Minneapolis. Expecting that Myers would show up and ask uncomfortable questions, it seems like the producers hired goons to keep Myers out (to expel him, if you will). PZ was removed from the screening, a screening he has signed up for properly for a movie he is featured in, but the goons didn't recognize PZ's guests, who they let in. You know who one of those guests was? Richard Freaking Dawkins. Probably the world's most famous and outspoken atheist, an evolutionary biologist, and also interviewed in the movie.

How dumb do you have be to make a series of mistakes this colossal. First of all, your movie is about unfair persecution and suppression of dissent and you throw out someone interviewed in the movie who dissents? And then, on top of that, you miss the most famous atheist in the world? Irony meter... Melting...

Anyway, I could continue giving descriptions of their incompetence, like plagiarizing an animation from Harvard, or pirating music from John Lennon and The Killers, but at this point it's really unnecessary.

They've been banking on the "any press is good press" theory of marketing, which is probably the only way they don't go to bed sobbing every night. Combine the hugely public fracas I've just described, and add in the astonishing number of bad reviews, too many to list here, and you have a recipe for disaster. Even Fox News panned it.

So, if you've made it this far and are still planning on seeing Expelled, I just ask that you do what I'm going to do.

Buy a ticket to a movie with a superior plot or real intellectual content, and sneak into Expelled instead. Tell your friends about how terrible it is, spread the word about their rank dishonesty and incompetence.

Send the message that intelligence is not only allowed, it's required.