Ben Stein, Walt Ruloff, and Mark Mathis have been rattily scurrying about the country, doing press conferences and radio interviews in an attempt to boost attendance at their upcoming schlockfest, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Their schtick is to claim that academia prohibits free speech, and doesn’t allow people to pursue the truth and ask questions.

There’s a problem, though. In order to have a media interview, they have to let media representatives into the room. They try to deal with this problem by making them sign a non-disclosure agreement (wait…they’re holding a press conference, but they don’t want the press to write it up afterwards?) I’m glad to see, though, that some journalists are still willing to report on the sleazy behavior of the Expelled crew.

Freedom of expression is unseemly at an Expelled press conference. There was no give-and-take, no open marketplace of ideas, in fact, scarcely any questions at all. Ruloff and Stein batted one softball after another out of the park from those posed by Paul Lauer, a representative of the film’s public relations firm. Questions from non-employees had to be submitted by email. Lauer (or somebody at his firm) screened them.

I’m not sure whether Thomas Aquinas handled media inquiries this way. I’ll have my people get back to your people on that.

The questions that made it through the screening were from: Listen Up TV, a Christian program; the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention; Focus on the Family; and the Colorado Catholic Herald. Four outside questions in 50 minutes of press conference, only two of which can be described as “press.”

I’ve participated in a lot of press conferences in my thirty years as a journalist. I once bumped into President Gerald Ford on the front lawn of the White House. I had a question for him, which he politely answered. I went to a press conference by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who took all of our questions and hung around afterward to talk with me. I’ve had press conference questions answered by physicists Hans Behe and Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb”; by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson; by John Wayne; by U.S, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney; by U.S. Sens. Alan Simpson, Craig Thomas, John Kerry, Malcolm Wallop and Gary Hart, and by lots and lots of other public figures whose time I’ve wasted. Some of my questions were argumentative, but all were thoroughly – if sometimes equally argumentatively —  answered.

Until I got to Ben Stein. Though calling for the rough-and-tumble of openness and debate, Stein didn’t have time for questions.

In my earlier review, I dealt with Expelled as a failed and dull attack on evolution. But this “press conference” convinced me that not only is Expelled and the intellectual movement behind it hypocritical in its supposed defense of “freedom of expression,” it’s an attack on the entire superstructure of science and technology that has created the modern world. Expelled is anti-rational.

I have a suggestion for the Expelled PR team. Stop inviting legitimate journalists altogether — they’re going to see right through your pretenses. Just invite the liars for Jesus of creationist apologetics: they don’t have any objections to dishonesty and ignorance, and will write much more sympathetic reviews.

What is it with creationists and fruit? I hope you’ve had your coffee already, because this is an unpleasant way to wake up. The clip below is from a public hearing in Orlando, Florida, in which citizens had a chance to stand up and state their opinions of evolution. Are you braced to handle a little smug and stupid this morning?

I’m sure this guy thought he was rhetorically brilliant, with a knock-’em dead argument against evolution. Why, nobody with any common sense could possibly believe that people (or their pets) could be related to an orange! Just pointing out the obvious to everyone, that round orange fruits don’t look anything like furry mobile animals, will reveal the absurdity of evolution.

Unfortunately for Mr Dallas Ellis, we really don’t have any problem seeing the similarities between oranges and kitty cats — scientists look a little deeper than he does. Slice an orange and put it under a microscope, and what do you see? Cells. Slice a cat and look at it under a microscope, and what do you see? Cells. We find similar organelles: cytoplasm, nuclei, mitochondria, etc. The contents use similar metabolic processes, and we find the same chemicals. The nuclei contain DNA, and we can compare the sequences — and we find similarities there (they are related) but many differences as well (they are distantly related — one estimate for the last common ancestor of plants and animals says they diverged roughly 1.6 billion years ago). Mr Ellis is relying on his profound ignorance of the basic building blocks of biology to make a superficial case.

Let’s not even get into his closing remarks, trying to compare evolution to trucks full of poultry and garbage colliding, and spontaneously fusing maggots and turkeys to produce the school board. It’s simply more evidence that he’s a clueless old git.

I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that I’m a distant relative of every creeping, crawling, blooming, squirming organism on the planet, but I do have to admit to some discomfort at being related to Mr Ellis. An orange has evolved no neurons and at least has an excuse for being unthinking, and hasn’t evolved speech and so spares us its mindless gibbering.

Would you believe there is actually an award called the Award for Liberty and Truth? You just know in this Orwellian country of ours that it couldn’t possibly be given in recognition of actual liberty or truth … but it’s even worse than that. It is the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, and it’s handed out by the Bible University of Los Angeles, better known as Biola; named after a prissy old fraud, given out by a bible college with delusions of grandeur, and guess who the winner is this year?

Ben Stein.

I like it.

It’s a fake award by a fake college named after an infamous creationist and now given to a second-rate character actor. It’s the creationist version of the Nobel Prize!

A poll by the St Petersburg Times reveals that the people in Florida are ignorant. 21% want creationism only taught in the schools, and 29% want both evolution and creationism taught. It’s a horrendous result, and it’s also strikingly different from the results we’ve see in similar polls, which usually aren’t quite so lop-sided.

Wesley makes a good point, that one reason is the form of the questions asked, which set up an adversarial relationship between religion and science and lead people to make a choice between the two, increasing the likelihood that people will break to support their church. He argues that “framing works,” and proposes a different set of questions that, while generally similar, would produce a less one-sided result.

But wait, hang on there — this doesn’t tell me that framing works. It tells me that you can play rhetorical games with polls and get people to nominally agree with my position, or you can tinker with them to get people to agree with some other position. If the purpose of a poll is to get insight into how the minds of the populace are working, neither is very desirable.

I’m looking at the original poll and seeing that I would have no problem answering the questions in a pro-evolution way — there’s nothing to bias me in any crazy way, but I don’t have any pro-religion buttons to push. What I see in the results is that many Floridians do have great, big, easily manipulated religious buttons, and that 69% are abysmally ignorant of the science they are dismissing. Those are important True Facts, and in an important sense the St Petersburg Times poll is better than the one Wesley proposes: the answers aren’t reassuring, but they do expose the ugly reality we have to confront. There is no virtue in designing a poll that doesn’t push the religion button, because in the real world these people are getting the religious message every day and every week, and leaving it out only allows us to fool ourselves into thinking that the superstition and ignorance fostered by American religion aren’t the fundamental source of creationist foolishness in this country.

I think Wesley is looking for a way to frame the problem away, rather than a solution. If framing works, it is only as a blindfold.