Expelled! Up for Sale

Via the Panda's Thumb we learn that the company Premise Media, the producers and distributors of Expelled! has gone belly up and the film is up for sale. Wesley Elsberry writes:

The auction promises that besides all available rights and interests in the finished film itself (there is an existing distribution contract), the winner will get all the production materials and rights to them. Want to know what was in the rest of the interviews with Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers? I know I would like to have that material archived and made available to the public, among other things that Premise Media found inconvenient to include in their film.

If some of the participants are correct in their assessments, there will be some very damning information in that material and the whole ID enterprise might get a rather black eye. Elsberry reasons that the price tag might be more than one individual can muster so an unlikely party has come forward:

Today, the TalkOrigins Archive Foundation approved a resolution to use our funds on hand to put in a bid on “Expelled”. We hope to make many of the materials freely available and to collaborate with other groups seeking to produce rebuttals to claims made in “Expelled”. To that end, we would like your help. Our final bid amount will be determined by funds on hand and what has come in via our PayPal donation button by Monday, June 27^th. This is because there are delays in transfers between PayPal and the bank, and (hopefully!) we’ll need to pay out of our bank account.

Sounds like a worthy cause to me.

[sorry, Foxytunes is not yet compatible with Firefox 5.0. No musical selection today]

Thoughts from Kansas: Creation vs. Expelled at the Box Office

Josh Rosenau has been tracking the box office numbers of Creation against those of Expelled! His take:

Darwin biopic Creation premiered in seven movie theaters across the country last weekend, earning $53,073, an average of $7,582. That's not a lot of money, but at roughly $10/ticket, this works out to 760 viewers per theater, a solid showing. I know the theater I saw it at was full for their 7 pm showing.

Compare that to creationist schlockumentary Expelled: No Intelligence…, released two springs ago. Part of its promotional strategy was a big opening weekend; coordinating with the owners of Regal movie theaters, they opened in 1,052 theaters, earning $2,970,848, or $2,824 per theater (roughly 280 viewers).

By my math, Creation did more than 3 times better than Expelled, and with a much smaller promotional budget. Which makes sense: it's a much better movie.

But be sure to read the comments.

----------------
Now playing: William Ackerman - The Opening of Doors
via FoxyTunes

Ben Stein Being Sincere and Not So Sincere

Ben Stein, speechwriter for presidents, host of the great game show "Win Ben Stein's Money," which, sadly, is not still on, and narrator of the movie Expelled! has been fired from his gig writing for the New York Times. As if William Kristol's example wasn't enough of a warning to other conservative writers, the Grey Lady will simply broach no conservatism. I am convinced that David Brooks puts his job on the line every time he writes a column. There are also some unanswered questions about why Stein was fired and it is reasonable to conclude that the reasons that were given are not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Along the way, however, he says some things that simply are not so. About the movie Expelled!, he writes the following:

Expelled was a plea for open discussion of the possibility that life might have started with an Intelligent Designer. This idea, that freedom of academic discussion on an issue as to which there is avid scientific disagreement has value, seems obvious to me. But it drives the atheists and neo-Darwinists crazy and they responded viciously.

No, it wasn't a plea for open discussion. Expelled! was a vicious diatribe against any and all things evolutionary, ending with the bald, unsupported claim that Darwin's views directly informed Hitler about how he was to treat people. This was complete with scenes of concentration camps, lest any viewer be unclear about just how evil evolution actually was. Furthermore, some of the cases that Mr. Stein profiled were not quite as he profiled them. See the excellent article "Expelled Exposed" for a recap of all of the claims and the holes in them. For added information about how dishonest the movie was, read this article by John Rennie and Steve Mirsky on "Six things in Expelled that Ben Stein doesn't want you to know." Does the end of destroying "Darwinism" really justify the means, especially when the means aren't very different from those that you decry?

----------------
Now playing: Synergy - Ancestors
via FoxyTunes

Creation Ministries UK Deceives Scientists

The BBC has a story on a film coming out shortly called The Voyage that Shook the World, about the life of Charles Darwin that has some scientists hopping mad:

Professor Peter Bowler, the author of a biography of Charles Darwin and many other books on the history of evolution, said he was interviewed for the The Voyage That Shook The World without realising that the film was being made by a Creationist group.

Professor Bowler, who has spent most of his academic career at Queen's University, Belfast, researching Darwinism, says he is unhappy to be appearing in what he regards as an "anti-Darwinian" film which offers an historically distorted portrait of Darwin. He claims that the film's narrative implies that Darwin's theory led him towards racism, whereas recent historical work by James Moore and Adrian Desmond shows that Darwin's scientific work was partly motivated by the naturalist's passionate opposition to racism.

The deception took the same form as that of Ben Stein's Expelled! and Bill Maher's Religulous:

Phil Bell, CEO of Creation Ministries UK, acknoweged that his organisation established a "front company" called Fathom Media, because they were concerned that experts such as Peter Bowler would not agree to take part in the film if they realised it was an "overtly Creationist" production. "At the end of the day," he said, "[when] people see 'Creationist', instantly the shutters go up and that would have shut us off from talking to the sort of experts, such as Professor Bowler, that we wanted to get to."

Gee, I can't imagine why that would be? Now here's the real kicker:

I asked Phil Bell if this method of securing an interview was "deceptive". He said: "Well, it could be called deceptive. But I think, at the end of the day, I would say that more people are concerned about how we've made a documentary, that's a world-class documentary, clearly with wonderful footage, with excellent interviews, and balanced open discussion."

In other words, it doesn't matter that he lied to people about why he was interviewing them, or that he lied about what the content of the film would be and therefore he feels justified in using deceptive tactics. How is God glorified in any of this??? How can it be a balanced, open discussion when the people doing the interviewing have a hidden agenda? This is exactly why creationists are vilified by scientists and why they will never get the legitimacy that they so long for and will never have.

Donald Prothero, in his introduction to the special transitional fossils issue of Evolution Education and Outreach puts it this way in his description of young earth creationists:

As discussed in my recent book (Prothero 2007), their tactics consisted of taking quotations out context (“quote mining”), citing old outdated sources or oversimplified trade books (and even children’s books), and misinterpreting what little bit of real science they did cite correctly. In no case was their “research” based on actual study and interpretation of real outcrops or fossils, since none of these creationist authors has any appropriate qualifications or training in paleontology or geology.

This just makes Christianity look deceptive and devious. We seek to show the truth of Christ to the world. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that young earth creationism is extremely harmful to the cause of Christ.

Hat tip to LGF.


----------------
Now playing: Yes - Turn Of The Century
via FoxyTunes