Hypocrisy with intelligent design proponents?! NO WAY, right? RIGHT? There's no way they'd lie . . .

For several months I've known that Ben Stein, a hack of an actor, has decided to get into the intelligent design craze by making a movie, Expelled, which purports that biology is keeping intelligent design out of biology. Well, duh. And astrology is kept out of astrophysics but why is it no one has a problem with that? ID isn't science, so, duh, ID proponents are being kept out of science. Part of what science does, when it works, is separate the crazy nut jobs from scientists. When ID does something scientific, folks will change their mind. I mean, OK, you people think that some designer introduced genetic changes into terrestial life - prove how, when and/or where and then you'll be taken seriously. Until they, just continuing to assert that a designer exists is going to be thought of as religious whitewashing of evolution, something that's been going on for a hundred and fifty years! So, duh, intelligent design is being kept out of science by scientists.

Beyond the inane concept of the movie, itself, is the tricks they thought they had to pull to get scientists to talk to them. On his blog, PZ Myers explains how they tricked him. One of the producers of Expelled contacted him under false pretenses, asking to do an interview for a totally different movie.

I just love it that people think that intelligent design isn't a total chimera invented by religious people to give specious credibility to their corrupt and decadent archaic worldview.

But wait, there's more! This NY Times article says that several scientists were contacted under exactly the same false pretenses, including Richard Dawkins and Eugenie Scott.

According to the NYT interview, Ben Stein said that there were no false pretenses and "no one asked what the movie was about." Of course they didn't! They'd already been told what the movie was about, it's just that they were lied to.

I love this stuff. Just the pure chutzpah of it. The absolute contempt not only for the truth, but the subtext that the truth just isn't important. I mean, if I was Ben Stein and I'd just learned that my producers had lied in order to get people to agree to be interviewed for this movie, I'd be sorry. I'd be mortified. Instead, he's, like, "Oh, they never asked." Fuck you. They didn't ask because your producer told them. What a mealy mouthed little twerp!

But, hey, I guess when you so clearly have nothing resembling the facts on your side you've got to do something else. Just the level of contempt for the truth and trickery is astonishing to me, even after all these years of it.