Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.
The battle over evolution is only one skirmish in a much larger war.
Science simply makes no use of the hypothesis of God.
Ask yourself, what has intelligent design given us?
Nothing.
We cannot accept intelligent design as an alternative scientific theory.
They will never accept that we have a better argument.
They just pester us and they waste our time.
Ben is speaking on the topic that has become increasingly important to him over
recent years.
While Ben has always been an ardent supporter of science, lately he has
noticed an alarming trend in the scientific establishment that could have
welcomed for Mr. Ben Stein.
Thank you very much, gangsters.
Freedom is the essence of America.
We're talking about freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from fear,
freedom of religion.
Martin Luther King said, America is essentially a dream.
And he said it is a dream of freedom and equality, and freedom is the way to
equality.
And America simply would not be America without freedom.
In every turning point in our history, the decision has always been about
freedom.
Freedom is what makes this country great.
Freedom has allowed us to create, to explore, to overcome every challenge we
have faced as a nation.
But imagine if these freedoms were taken away.
Where would we be?
What would we lose?
Well, unfortunately, I no longer need to imagine.
It's happening.
We are losing our freedom in one of the most important sectors of society,
science.
I have always assumed that scientists were free to ask any question, to pursue any
line of inquiry, without fear of reprisal.
But recently, I have been alarmed to discover that this is not the case.
It all began when I met evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg in Washington,
D.C.
His life was nearly ruined when he strayed from the party line while serving as
editor of a scientific journal affiliated with the prestigious Smithsonian Museum of
Natural History.
Your office was over there?
That's correct.
This here is the West Wing.
Directly ahead of us is the West Wing of the Natural History Museum.
So now you're not there anymore because you're a bad boy.
No, I'm not.
No, I was exiled.
You're a bad boy.
You question the powers that be.
What was Dr. Sternberg's crime?
He dared to publish an article by Dr. Stephen Meyer, one of the leading lights
of the Intelligent Design movement.
The paper ignited a firestorm of controversy, merely because it suggested
Intelligent Design might be able to explain how life began.
As a result, Dr. Sternberg lost his office, his political and religious
beliefs were investigated, and he was pressured to resign.
The questioning of Darwinism was a bridge too far for many.
The mentioning of Intelligent Design that occurs at the end of the paper was over
the top.
And I think the Intelligent Design proponents have raised a number of very
important questions.
And you wanted to get those questions brought up and discussed.
Placed on the table.
People were so upset about it.
They were so upset that you could see their... they had a physical emotional
reaction.
Wow.
They were saying that Stephen C.
Meyer is a well-known Christian, that Stephen C.
Meyer is an Intelligent Design proponent, that Stephen C.
Meyer is a Republican.
It was all couched in terms of religion, politics, and sociology.
The way the chair of the department put it is that I was viewed as an intellectual
terrorist.
Terrorist.
Because of giving the topic of Intelligent Design some modicum of credibility.
What happened to Dr. Sternberg was terrible, but surely it was just an
isolated case.
I was still pretty skeptical, so naturally I checked in with the head of the Skeptic
Society, Michael Shermer.
So I can't prove there is no God or Yahweh in your case, any more than I can prove
there is no Isis, Zeus, Apollo, Brahma, Ganesha, Mithras, Allah,
or for that matter the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
And think about just one thing, why would the aliens look like this?
Who drew that?
Skepticism, it's not a position you take, it's just an approach to claims.
This one is called the Borderlands of Science, where sense meets nonsense.
Is Intelligent Design nonsense?
Well, it's unproven, so in that sense it's nonsense.
So I would put it in the sort of shaded areas between good solid science and total
nonsense, you know, it's sort of three quarters of the way toward the nonsense
side.
But you think nevertheless people should be allowed to speak about it and publish
papers about it?
They are free to write and publish and be heard in public forums and go to
conferences just like everybody else does.
Well, what if a person published something, say it's a Smithsonian,
in favor of Intelligent Design and then lost his job over it?
And it had been peer-reviewed and published and then he lost his job over it
anyway.
What would happen?
What do you think about that situation?
I think that particular situation there was something else going on.
What was going on?
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know because I don't know, but I think there had to be something.
People don't get fired over something like that.
You roll up your sleeves, you get to work, you do the research, you get your grants,
you get your data, you publish and you work your butt off and that's how you get
your theories taught.
But wait a minute.
What if you try and try and roll up your sleeves and go to work and work your butt
off and they say, well, we're going to fire you if you even mention the word
Intelligent Design?
I don't think that's happening.
Where is that happening?
George Mason University.
Throughout its 50 year history, our mission has remained clear.
To prepare a diverse population of students to think and to grow in a climate
of unbridled academic freedom.
After Dr. Caroline Crocker simply mentioned Intelligent Design in her cell
biology class at George Mason University, her promising academic career came to an
abrupt end.
My supervisor invited me into his office.
He said, I'm going to have to discipline you for teaching creationism.
And I said, I mentioned Intelligent Design on a couple of slides, but I did not teach
creationism.
He said, nonetheless, you have to be disciplined.
At the end of the semester, I lost my job.
Not only did this well-loved professor lose her job at George Mason, she suddenly
found herself blacklisted, unable to find a job anywhere.
So whenever I interviewed for a job, I would be offered it usually on the spot.
Since this has happened, and since people can Google my name, I'm finding that when
I send my credentials, I do get interviews, I get many interviews,
but I never get offered a job.
I don't tell them about my science sin.
I was only trying to teach what the university stands for, which is academic
freedom.
There's nothing to be learned in neurosurgery by assuming an accidental
origin for the parts of the brain that we work on.
It wasn't just biologists who were feeling the Darwinist's wrath.
When neurosurgeon Michael Egnor wrote an essay to high school students saying
doctors didn't need to study evolution in order to practice medicine, the Darwinists
were quick to try and exterminate this new threat.
A lot of people on a lot of blogs called me unprintable names that were printed.
There are a lot of very, very nasty comments.
Other people suggested that people call the university I work at and suggested
perhaps it's time for me to retire.
I realized when I kind of went public with my doubts about the adequacy of Darwin's
theory that I would encounter criticism.
What has amazed me is the viciousness and the sort of baseness of it.
I'm an old guy, I have tenure, I'm academically safe, but the young
people and what is happening to them in America right now because of this
scientism gulag is really terrible.
Apparently, Professor Marx was not as safe as he thought.
A few months after this interview, Baylor University shut down his research
website and forced him to return grant money once they discovered a link between
his work and intelligent design.
In order to attract grants, you have to market yourself.
So you put up sites and call yourself labs and groups and things like that in order
to get visibility.
And in my entire experience in academia, I never went to any superior and asked
them any permission to put up any of these labs.
So the fact that this was singled out, let alone shut down is jaw dropping.
It's astonishing.
I have never been treated like this in my about 30 years in academia.
If you peel back the onion, I think that there is no doubt that the center of this
is my work in what some would call intelligent design.
People really get emotional about this.
When you ever say intelligent design in a room of academics, them's fighting words.
Creationists.
Astronomer Guillermo Gonzales found himself in a fierce shootout with Iowa
State University following the publication of his book, arguing that the universe is
intelligently designed.
Despite a stellar research record that has led to the discovery of several planets,
his application for tenure was denied, putting his career in jeopardy.
I worried about my tenure a little bit in 2005 when the petition was being
circulated because I viewed that as a strategy of Hector Avalos and his
associates to try to poison the atmosphere on campus against me because he knew I
wasn't tenured yet and I was very vulnerable.
I have little doubt that I would have tenure now if I hadn't done any
professional work on intelligent design.
Dr. Gonzales had this advice for scientists who might be thinking about
following his example.
If they value their careers, they should keep quiet about their intelligent design
views.
We know there are times and places to be quiet and other times and places when we
can make noise if we want to.
Will you show us?
Of course.
Boys and girls, how would you like to show some of the ways we know of being quiet?
It's the kind of thing where you just learn to keep your mouth shut.
In addition to those scientists who were willing to appear on camera, we
encountered many more who didn't dare show their face for fear of losing their jobs.
You use an intelligent design perspective to get the research done, but you're not
allowed to talk about it in public.
And so there is definitely incentive, if you think about it, for people to
remain within the mainstream.
You know, what's he up to?
What is he thinking?
Is he one of them?
That kind of thing.
If I write intelligent design, they hear creationism.
They hear religious right.
They hear theocracy.
So it appears Mr. Shermer, the self-styled skeptic, was wrong on this one.
Intelligent design was being suppressed in a systematic and ruthless fashion.
But maybe intelligent design should be suppressed.
I didn't like what was happening to these scientists, but on the other hand,
we don't want our kids being taught that the Earth is flat or that the Holocaust
never happened.
It was time to ask the scientific establishment, what was so bad about
intelligent design?
Intelligent design people are not genuine scientists.
Intelligent design is a racket.
It's just propaganda.
The only intelligent thing about it is to have got people to call it that.
It's really very stupid as well.
Everybody knows science education in America is appalling.
What we don't need at this time is intelligent design in the classrooms.
To present intelligent design stunts their educational growth.
It stunts their intellectual growth.
But what I don't understand is how these animals could have been on Earth millions
of years before man.
And the Bible says the whole Earth was created in only six days.
It wasn't just the educational aspects of intelligent design that had scientists
concerned.
Many suspected the movement masked a much larger agenda.
Intelligent design is a set of excuses to squeeze creationism into the classrooms.
Get intelligent design in the schools today and we can have school prayers
tomorrow.
Any other complaints?
Can you imagine anything more boring?
The boredom attached to I.D.
is supreme.
It is so boring that I can't even bother to think about it much anymore.
It's just utterly boring.
Love is in the air.
Everywhere I look around.
Love is in the air.
Every sight and every sound.
Love was in the air all right, but none of it was directed toward
intelligent design.
There seemed to be a lot to hate about I .D.
and nearly all of that hatred was focused on one place.
The people from the Discovery Institute, the people who are doing the intelligent
design, they're all varnish and no product.
The Discovery Institute is a propaganda mill.
It's an institution designed to suck in money from religious investors and turn it
into a sanitized, somewhat secular version of the creation story to get it into the
schools.
If they have a way of understanding nature that's superior to the one that we all are
making lots of discoveries using, great.
Bring it on.
We are really, really lost.
I think it's on third.
I think it's down there.
I have no idea where this place is.
I guess I'll just keep walking.
Do you have any idea where the Discovery Institute is?
Have you ever heard of that?
Never heard of that.
Okay, thank you.
How are you, sir?
Good.
Do you have any idea where the Discovery Institute is?
Not a clue.
Thank you.
Welcome to Seattle.
Thank you, sir.
It's got to be this whole building.
Yes, where is the Discovery Institute, please?
Discovery Institute is on 8th floor, suite 808.
Okay, very good.
Aha!
Success at last.
Aha!
We found you.
Are you Bruce Chapman?
I am.
How are you?
I'm Ben Stein.
Very kind of you to have me here.
I'm delighted to meet you.
Can I look around and see your offices?
Absolutely.
Do you just have this floor or do you have several other floors as well?
No, this is it.
This is it?
You've been in an awful lot of trouble for being in such a small office.
I thought it was going to be like the Pentagon.
We're like the little boy that said the emperor has no clothes.
And he didn't have a big organization either.
When you go around and raise funds, your people are not saying to you,
by the way, we're going to get all these scientists out of the classroom and put
Christ back in the classroom.
Well, I don't know that Christ has ever been in the science classroom.
This is not a religious argument.
This is something that people...
We have fellows who are Jewish or agnostic or various other things.
There are people... there are Muslim scientists.
There are people of all kinds of backgrounds who agree that Darwin's theory
has failed.
And so why would you bring religion into it?
You don't need religion.
This is a red herring.
And people who don't have an argument are reduced to throwing sand in your eyes.
Well, if the Discovery Institute could get its wish about this subject, what would
your wish be?
Well, on this subject, as on others, we'd like people to be able to have a
robust dialogue and even a debate where the evidence, the best evidence,
in this case the best scientific evidence, is made available to people.
Well, surely no one questions there should be a debate.
Oh, yes, they do.
They do?
They say the debate has been settled.
When was the debate settled?
Ben, I'd like you to talk to the scientists.
You don't want to get your science from me.
Mr. Chapman claimed I.D.
had nothing to do with religion.
So why was my first stop Biola University, formerly known as the Bible Institute of
Los Angeles?
Your own personal Jesus.
Someone to hear your prayers.
Someone who's there.
How much money have you ever gotten from Jerry Falwell?
Uh, zero dollars.
How about Pat Robertson?
Zero.
Are you a minister?
No.
Are you a priest?
No.
Pastor?
No.
Youth pastor.
Oh, I did teach Sunday school once.
Has this all been resolved?
I mean, aren't we all Darwinists now?
Except for a few cranks like you.
Well, it's a funny thing that questions that aren't properly answered don't go
away.
This question is loaded with all kinds of political baggage, but one-on-one at a
scientific meeting, after the third or fourth beer, my experience has been that
many evolutionary biologists will say, yeah, this theory's got a lot of problems.
So you're meaning to tell me that there really is a debate among scientists about
whether or not evolution occurred?
Well, evolution is a kind of funny word.
It depends on how one defines it.
If it means simply change over time, even the most rock-ribbed fundamentalist
knows that the history of the Earth has changed, that there's been change over
time.
If you define evolution precisely, though, to mean the common descent of all
life on Earth from a single ancestor via undirected mutation and natural selection,
that's textbook definition of neo-Darwinism.
Biologists of the first rank have real questions.
But the modern theory of intelligent design is just microwaved creationism.
I don't think that's the case.
Creationism, properly understood, begins with the Bible and says,
how can I fit the Bible into the data of science?
Intelligent design doesn't do that.
Intelligent design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained
as a result of intelligence.
So, intelligent designers believe that God is the designer?
Not necessarily.
Intelligent design is a minimal commitment, scientifically, to the
possibility of detecting intelligent causation.
Dr. Nelson didn't sound like a crazy person, but I still suspected I.D.
was nothing but reheated creationism.
My next stop didn't seem like I was going to alleviate those fears.
I didn't crawl out of the ocean, I didn't come from no monkey.
Science tends to forget evolution's just a theory.
They present it in the textbooks and on animal TV.
Pockets of fact would tell me were you there 12 million B.C.
Evolution, from an intelligent design perspective, is perfectly acceptable if
the sense is that, how did the design get implemented?
The issue is, is there real design there and are these material mechanisms,
like natural selection, are these adequate to account for everything we see in
biology?
And our argument is, no, it's not.
But Darwin produced all this evidence from his travels and his studies of the
Galapagos that evolution explained things.
If you look at the history of science, people often have a good idea and then
they decide just to run with it.
And they say, we're going to apply this everywhere.
And so Darwin takes his idea of natural selection and says, I'm going to explain
all of life with it.
I mean, physics used to be Newtonian physics.
Newton was physics.
And then you've got to look to Einstein, general relativity.
Newton isn't enough.
I think likewise, what we're finding with Darwin is that he had some valid insights,
but it's not the whole picture.
Okay, Darwinism may not be the complete picture, but what made these guys think
they had the missing pieces?
I put this question to Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of the paper that originally got
Dr. Sternberg in so much trouble.
It's hard to believe that this little town is the headquarters of giant Microsoft.
It's enabled Mr. Gates to become fantastically rich.
Maybe that's what Stephen Meyer is doing.
Maybe this is somehow going to make him fantastically rich.
We'll pin him down like a butterfly on a butterfly board.
A butterfly on a killing board.
Coffee shop straight ahead.
Newton is buried in the geniuses' corner at Westminster Abbey, right?
That's correct, yeah.
Darwin is also buried in Westminster Abbey.
Right, and so is Darwin.
Right near each other, right?
And you're here in Redmond, in a little building without a sign, right?
And you're obviously an incredibly smart guy, but how dare you challenge someone
who's buried in the geniuses' corner next to Newton at Westminster Abbey?
Well, it may seem a little cheeky, but it's what scientists are supposed to
do.
When I was in Cambridge, one of my supervisors often advised us to beware the
sound of one hand clapping, which was a way of saying if there's an argument on
one side, there's bound to be an argument on the other.
And what I found in studying the structure of the argument in The Origin of Species
is that for every evidence-based argument for one of Darwin's two key propositions,
there is an evidence-based counter-argument.
But is it a debate?
I mean, there's just you and a couple of other guys in a dinky little office
downtown on one side, and there's the faculties of all the great universities of
the world on the other side.
Speaking with a great uniform and authoritative voice.
Well, in any case, the debate really isn't going to be settled by numbers.
It's going to be settled by the evidence and the arguments.
While I was still in Bill Gates' country, Dr. Meyer recommended I check in with
molecular biologist Jonathan Wells.
What kind of names do they call you?
Creationist.
What do you say back to them when they say you're a creationist?
Well, I usually don't get the opportunity.
What's at stake for you personally here?
First of all, I love science.
I think the way Darwinism corrupts the evidence, distorts the evidence,
is bad for science.
Well, the other scientists would tell you to just shut up if you love science.
Because you're sort of being a bomb thrower into science.
I am upsetting the apple cart, and I think it deserves to be upset in
this case.
Why?
Because the evidence is being distorted to prop up a theory that I think doesn't fit
it.
Was Darwinism really that bad?
Perhaps a change of scenery would give me a fresh perspective.
So, let's see.
Mr. Berlinski, I assume.
How are you, sir?
So, where are you from, originally?
I was born in New York.
Spent 31 years in Manhattan.
And I spent a lot of time in California, too.
Tell me all the various universities where you studied or taught.
I was at Princeton, then I had a professorship at Stanford, and then I left
Stanford and I taught at Rutgers.
I left Rutgers and I taught at the City College in New York.
I left the City College in New York, I taught at the Baruch College,
I taught at San Jose.
What did you teach at Baruch College?
Anything they wanted.
Come on in.
Thank you, monsieur.
What an old building.
It's the oldest in Paris.
You're kidding.
Merci, monsieur.
Ah, je vous en prie, monsieur.
Merci.
Wow, this is fabulous.
Let's put it this way.
Before you can ask, is Darwinian theory correct or not, you have to ask the
preliminary question, is it clear enough so that it could be correct?
That's a very different question.
One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian theory is, man, that thing is
just a mess.
It's like looking into a room full of smoke.
Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined or delineated.
It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical
physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics.
So we're talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we
reach evolutionary biology.
We don't even know what a species is, for heaven's sakes.
So his theory is smoke, but elegant smoke.
There's a certain elegance to it, but, you know, I think Einstein had the
appropriate remark.
He preferred to leave elegance to his tailor.
A room full of smoke?
That certainly wasn't what I was hearing from prominent Darwinists like Richard
Dawkins.
Evolution is a fact.
It's a fact which is established as securely as essentially any other fact
that we have in science.
Richard Dawkins is so confident that evolution is a fact, and that therefore
God doesn't exist, that he has devoted his entire life to spreading the evolution
gospel.
I'm an atheist with respect to the Judeo-Christian God, because there is not
a shred of evidence in favor of the Judeo-Christian God.
It is completely right to say that since the evidence for evolution is so
absolutely, totally overwhelming, nobody who looks at it could possibly
doubt that if they were sane, and not stupid.
So the only remaining possibility is that they're ignorant, and most people who
don't believe in evolution are indeed ignorant.
But the people I spoke with weren't ignorant.
They were highly credentialed scientists.
So there had to be something else going on here.
So you think the whole theory of evolution is false, or just certain parts of it?
Well, again, evolution is a slippery word.
I would say minor changes within species happen.
But Darwin didn't write a book called How Existing Species Change Over Time.
He wrote a book called The Origin of Species.
He purported to show how this same process leads to new species, in fact,
every species.
And the evidence for that grand claim is, in my opinion, almost totally lacking.
How does Darwin, or Darwinism, say life began?
Well, he didn't know.
And in fact, nobody knows.
So Darwinism, strictly defined, starts after the origin of life,
and deals only with living things.
Well, how can there be a theory about life without a theory about how life began?
Well, a grand, overarching evolutionary story, of course, does include the origin
of life.
But Darwin's theory doesn't begin until you have the first cell.
Well, does someone have a theory about how life began?
This is the story of a small planet in space called Earth.
For a typical Darwinian explanation of how life originated, Dr. Wells directed me
toward this documentary.
The chemical elements essential for life, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen,
were now in place.
What was needed was a way of combining them.
Perhaps the energy came from lightning.
Whatever it was.
Excuse me?
Whatever it was, energy managed to arrange these chemical ingredients in just the
right way.
Whatever it was?
I was hoping for something a little more scientific.
The most popular idea has been that life emerged spontaneously from primordial
soup.
In 1953, Stanley Miller mixed water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen to simulate
the early Earth's atmosphere.
Then, he ran electricity through it in an attempt to jumpstart life.
It didn't work.
While the initial results seemed promising, 50 years later, most serious
scientists have abandoned this approach in favor of alternate theories.
Prominent Darwinist Michael Ruse attempted to explain one of them to me.
He wasn't kidding.
How did we get from an inorganic world to the world of the cell?
Well, one popular theory is that it might have started off on the backs of crystals.
My crystal ball.
Molecules piggybacked on the back of crystals forming, and that this led to
more and more complex...
But, of course, the nice thing about crystals is every now and then you get
mistakes, mutations, and that this opens the way for natural selection.
But at one point there was not a living thing.
Yeah.
And then there was a living thing.
How did that happen?
Well, I've just told you.
And I don't see any reason why you shouldn't go from very simple to more and
more complex to more and more complex.
I don't either, but I don't know how you get from mud to a living cell.
That's my question.
Yes, well, I've told you.
I think it was on the back of crystals.
Try one more time.
On the backs of crystals.
On the backs of crystals is at least one hypothesis, yes.
So that's your theory, and you think that is more likely and less far-fetched than
intelligent design?
I think it is.
I wouldn't put Ben Stein's money on Dr. Roos's joyriding crystals, but it did make
me wonder, what were the chances of life arising on its own?
It's been speculated that probably there would have to be a minimum of about 250
proteins to provide minimal life function.
If that's really true, then I think it's almost inconceivable that life could have
happened in some simple step-by-step way.
Okay, so the simplest form of life requires at least 250 proteins to
function.
What's so difficult about that?
Welcome to the casino of life.
Who wants to spin for a chance to win?
Oh, sure.
I'll give it a shot.
What do I win?
Take a look at this.
How about the world's first single-cell organism?
This perfectly aligned string of proteins could be yours.
Now, take a spin.
I won!
Tina, tell him how many times he needs to do that to win the prize.
250.
That's right, folks.
And all in the correct order.
But that's impossible.
We've heard that before, haven't we, Richard?
Come on, Mother Nature.
Do your thing.
You stupid machine!
I hate you!
We're talking about something that's staggeringly improbable.
Roughly one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.
Let all of life choose a million, a trillion, a trillion, trillion.
The number is essentially zero.
Something has to skew nature to choose the ones that work.
So, in the game of life, it looks as if the house always wins.
Luckily, some serious scientific minds have figured out a way to beat the odds.
Directed Panspermia!
When faced with the overwhelming problem of the origin of life, Nobel Prize winner
Francis Crick proposed this theory, that life was seeded on Earth.
Which basically means aliens did it.
Crystals?
Aliens?
I thought we were talking about science, not science fiction.
We don't know what caused life to arise.
Did it arise by a purely undirected process, or did it arise by some kind of
intelligent guidance or design?
And the rules of science are being applied to actually foreclose one of the two
possible answers to that very fundamental and basic and important question.
So, the rules of science say we will consider any possibility except one that
is guided.
Exactly.
No matter how life began, on the backs of crystals or in the test tube of some
intelligent designer, everyone agrees it started with a single cell.
But what is a cell?
Let me ask you a question.
Yeah.
Darwin wrote The Origin of Species in 1859, published it in 1859.
He had an idea of the cell as being quite simple, correct?
Yeah, everybody did.
Okay, if he thought of the cell as being a Buick, what is the cell now in terms of
its complexity by comparison?
A galaxy.
If Darwin thought a cell was, say, a mud hut, what do we now know that a cell
is?
More complicated than a Saturn V.
So, what is in a cell as far as we know now?
A world that Darwin never could have imagined.
I needed someone who could give me a glimpse into this world, so we went to
molecular biologist Doug Axe.
Think of a cell as being a nanofactory, a factory where, on a very small scale,
digital instructions are being used to make the components of the factory.
Here we have the famous DNA double helix.
You can see the two helical strands that are intertwined and wind around each other
on the outside of the molecule.
This is the material that stores all of our genetic information.
In higher life forms, this will be the equivalent of something like a gigabyte of
information stored in the molecules that form the individual chromosomes,
all packed within the nucleus, which is a tiny fraction of the entire
cell size.
So, what does DNA do?
Well, the information in DNA ends up providing the information for sequencing
the amino acids to make protein.
We have information in a one-dimensional form that provides the information for a
three-dimensional form.
I'm finally just beginning to grasp the complexity of the cell.
Are there systems within the cell that go well beyond Darwinian evolution?
Some type of cellular technology that drives adaptation, replication,
quality control and repair?
What if these new mechanisms have massive design implications?
Well, I say, so be it.
The cell really is like nothing we've ever seen in the physical world.
That's got to be firmly grasped.
That's not something we can just say, oh, well, it's just a little bit more of
the same old, same old.
It's not the same old, same old.
What we are finding is that there's information that's in the cell that cannot
be accounted for in terms of these undirected material causes.
It has to be.
And so there's some other... so there has to be an information source.
So one of the key questions faced by modern biology is, where do you get
information from?
Well, Darwin assumed that the increase in information comes from natural selection.
But natural selection reduces genetic information.
And we know this from all the genetic population studies that we have.
And where is the new genetic information going to come from?
Well, that's the big question.
So when we find information in the DNA molecule, the most likely explanation is
that it, too, had an intelligent source.
I mean, we need engineering principles to understand these systems, okay?
I mean, it's only because of our advancements in nanotechnology that we can
even begin to appreciate these systems.
But using intelligent design didn't seem to stop the scientists I spoke with.
So why all the controversy?
Suppose we find, simply as a matter of fact, that our scientific inquiries point
in one direction.
Which is that there is an intelligent creator.
Why should we eliminate that from discussion?
Streng verboten?
How come?
Why?
Streng verboten.
Very good.
What does streng verboten mean?
Strongly forbidden.
You've got two possible hypotheses.
You've got a wall through the middle of your... through your brain, in effect,
through your thinking.
You say, well, you can't consider anything on this side of the wall.
Only hypotheses on this side of the wall are permissible for consideration.
What about academic freedom?
I mean, can't we just talk about this?
They... their reply is that science is not a democratic process.
Oh, really?
And that there is a consensus view.
But wait a minute, but...
And that we are to subscribe to the consensual view.
But wait a second, but Darwin challenged the consensus view, and that's how we got
Darwinism.
If Darwin wanted to challenge the consensus today, how would he do it?
Science isn't a hobby for rich aristocrats anymore.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry.
And if you want a piece of the pie, you've got to be a good comrade.
Scientific ideas.
How do we get them to you, the people?
Every idea must be inspected to ensure that it is safe.
All theories must pass through a series of checkpoints.
First, the academy.
Getting a controversial theory through the academy can be dangerous.
Few people know this better than Congressman Mark Souder.
He uncovered a targeted campaign, led by individuals within the Smithsonian
and the National Center for Science Education, to destroy Dr. Sternberg's
credibility.
If you want peer reviews, if you want to be published, if you want to go to
respected institutions, the core view does not tolerate dissent.
There's kind of a, this is the way it is, and anybody who is a dissenter should be
squashed.
Are you going to be on my side if I let you up?
Sure, Dick, sure.
I'm on your side.
Just let me up.
I'll do anything you say.
Souder isn't the only one who has witnessed the academy's tactics.
Journalist Larry Witham has seen similar behavior during his 25 years of covering
the evolution controversy.
Once you're thick in science, you can't question the paradigm.
But if you want to get grants, if you want to be elected to high
positions, if you want to get awards as a promoter of public education of science,
you can't question the paradigm.
People cannot be trusted to form their own opinions.
This business about open-mindedness is nonsense.
Why is the scientific establishment so afraid of free speech?
There is this fear that if one aspect of a theory is closely scrutinized,
there's going to be an unraveling.
Who are you?
I am the great and powerful wizard of Oz.
I interviewed dozens and dozens of scientists, and when they're amongst each
other or talking to a journalist who they trust, they'll speak about, you know,
it's incredibly complex or molecular biology is in a crisis.
But publicly, they can't say that.
Keeping a keen eye on the academy, our various watchdog organizations.
Listen to Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education.
The NCSE has been at the heart of virtually every evolution controversy over
the past 25 years, vigorously defending the Darwinian gospel.
We have had a lot of business, unfortunately, at NCSE in the last few
years because virtually every state in which science education standards has come
up for consideration has had a big fight about the coverage of evolution in them.
NCSE was started by a group of scientists and teachers who were very concerned
because in the late 70s and early 80s, there were a lot of attempts to pass equal
time for creation science and evolution laws.
And clearly, this is something that neither scientists nor teachers liked.
It wasn't exactly, help, help, the creationists are coming, but it's,
you know, kind of along those lines.
Most scientists just throw up their hands and say, creationists, they drive me
crazy.
You know, you handle it.
We've worked a lot with science education organizations.
The most important group we work with is members of the faith community because the
best kept secret in this controversy is that Catholics and mainstream Protestants
are okay on evolution.
Are you sure about that, Eugenie?
Liberal Christians have been fighting with conservative Christians for so long that
they'll side with anybody against the fundamentalists.
And Eugenie Scott says, well, welcome over.
There's a kind of science defense lobby or an evolution defense lobby in particular.
They are mostly atheists, but they are wanting to, desperately wanting to be
friendly to mainstream, sensible religious people.
And the way you do that is to tell them that there's no incompatibility between
science and religion.
But is there really an incompatibility?
Can't we believe in God and Darwin?
Implicit in most evolutionary theory is that either there's no God or God can't
have anything, any role in it.
So naturally, as many evolutionists will say, it's the strongest engine for
atheism.
They called me as a witness and a lawyer said, Dr. Dawkins, has your belief in
evolution, has your study of evolution turned you towards atheism?
I would have to say yes.
And that's the worst possible thing I could say for winning that court case.
So people like me are bad news for the science lobby, the evolution lobby.
By the way, I'm being a hell of a lot more frank and honest in this interview than
many people in this field would be.
Working hard to keep ideas in check are our friends in the media.
Boarding paper.
Paper, mister.
The tendency of the media is to side with the establishment because they inherently
agree with the establishment.
Eugenie Scott, my understanding is that there is not a single peer-reviewed
article out there that supports intelligent design.
Am I wrong?
You are not wrong.
You are correct.
I believe that we get coverage, but we always get coverage like we're the
outsider, not like it's an even debate.
But instead of merely reporting news, he analyzes it, often expressing his
personal opinions.
We constantly deal with reporters who refuse even to report the correct
definition of intelligent design.
They over and over again talk about life is so complex, God must have done it.
Just admit it, it's religion.
It's religion.
It's a wanton distortion of our position.
I'll tell you that.
I've got a hot story here.
You can look at associated press stories, and the same sentence will appear in those
stories for ten years.
Intelligent design says that life is too complex.
It's called a boilerplate.
And the reporter never reports anymore or gets any new ways to say it, so the public
understanding never advances.
But what happens if a reporter decides to take a more balanced approach to
intelligent design?
There might be remarkable pressure on that reporter not to side against the
evolutionists.
I thought I told you to kill that story.
Few reporters have learned this better than author and journalist Pamela Winick.
When she refused to take sides in an article she wrote about intelligent
design, the Darwinists found a new favorite target.
Number one, I wasn't Christian, I was Jewish.
Number two, I wasn't religious.
Number three, I was not taking a position in favor of creationism.
I was writing about intelligent design, and it didn't matter.
After I wrote that one piece, everything I wrote on the subject was scrutinized.
There were hate letters coming into the newspaper.
If you give any credence to it whatsoever, which means just writing about it,
you are just finished as a journalist.
Other journalists we spoke with told similar stories, but didn't dare appear on
camera.
And now the presses are ready to roll.
When all other checkpoints fail, there is always the courts.
We have spent an enormous amount of time trying to prove to the court what
everybody already knows.
That intelligent design is a particular religious belief.
But I thought scientific questions were settled by the evidence, not by taking
people to court and suing them.
How do other countries deal with such disputes?
Dr. Marci Giertuck, a population geneticist who now represents Poland in
the European Parliament, was able to shed some light on this topic.
The censorship of teaching criticism of evolution is, and always was, much
stronger in, say, your country, the United States, than it ever was in
Poland.
Why?
Why would the censorship...
That is because you have a political correctness in your country.
These issues are brought to court, and the court says what you can and what
you cannot teach.
We want to know what you teach, what books you use, how you teach it.
We never had that sort of way of deciding scientific issues in Poland.
We never had the courts in Poland.
So you are saying that as far as the teaching of science is concerned,
Poland is freer academically than the United States.
I think in this particular issue of evolution, I think this is true.
But how effective are the courts in deciding such matters?
What about the general idea that intelligent design is doomed as a result
of several recent legal setbacks?
I think court cases don't decide anything.
I mean, if you look at the Scopes trial, who won that trial?
It wasn't the evolutionists.
I mean, the Tennessee law was upheld, barring evolution.
And yet, in the popular imagination, Scopes is the hero, Inherit the Win.
That movie, which is really bogus history based on the Scopes trial, has carried the
day.
These issues go much deeper than any decision by a judge.
The evolution debate does seem to run much deeper than the courts.
Much deeper even than science.
To generate this level of hostility, ID must threaten something at the very
core of the Darwinian establishment.
The entire globe is today the site of a momentous conflict.
It is the challenge of ideas.
I am Edward R.
Murrow.
For a little while, I would like to review with you the great conflict of our times.
One which demands and must get the attention and the involvement of each one
of us.
This conflict over the principles of evolution has become a religious war.
It really is no longer about scientific investigation.
It is total competition with an antagonist who is putting into it everything within
his capability.
The situation has reached a point where many of evolution's top apologists have
switched from defending Darwinism to attacking religion in what they see as a
bid to stamp out intelligent design at the source.
Richard Dawkins is the best example of this.
His recent book, The God Delusion, has sold over one million copies
worldwide.
The God Delusion is my long expected, long worked on full frontal attack on
religion.
To me, science is about trying to explain existence and religion is about trying to
explain existence.
It's just that religion gets the wrong answer.
But is Dawkins correct?
Are science and religion really at war?
For an appraisal of this continuing and protracted conflict, we can go to a
reporter who has watched the growing conflict with the perception of a trained
military observer.
Oxford professor Alistair McGrath, author of The Dawkins Delusion,
seemed like the ideal person to answer my question.
Richard Dawkins has a charming and very, I think, interesting view of the
relationship between science and religion.
They're at war with each other and in the end, one's got to win and it's going to be
science.
It's a very naive view.
It's based on a complete historical misrepresentation of the way science and
religion have been directed.
Dawkins seems to think that a scientific description is an anti-religious argument.
Describing how something happens scientifically somehow explains it away.
It doesn't.
But the questions of purpose, intentionality, the question why,
still remain there on the table.
And I think it's just a catastrophic mistake to have someone like Dawkins
address himself to profound issues of theology, the existence of God,
the nature of life.
He hasn't committed himself to discipline study in any relevant area of inquiry.
He's a crummy philosopher.
He doesn't have the rudimentary skills to meticulously assess his own arguments.
Genius guy though.
Very smart guy.
A little bit of a reptile, but a very smart guy.
The opposing point of view in this conflict rests on a fundamentally
different vision of man.
If you have two distinguished scientists, and in fact you can range many more on
each side as you know, saying exactly opposite things, that's telling me that
the conflict is not between science and belief in God, otherwise you'd expect all
scientists to be atheists, but it's a worldview conflict.
It's between scientists who have different worldviews.
You've got two competing explanations of the evidence.
One says design, one says undirected processes.
Both of them have larger philosophical or religious or anti-religious implications.
So you can't say that one of those two theories is scientific and the other is
unscientific simply because they have implications.
Both have implications.
People who tell you, for example, that science tells you all you need to
know about the world, or that science tells you that religion is all wrong,
or science tells you that there is no God, those people aren't telling you scientific
things.
They are saying metaphysical things, and they have to defend their positions
for metaphysical reasons.
What is being presented to the public is, first comes the science, and then comes
the worldview.
I would want to argue that that may not be the case, that it may actually be the
other way around.
But the worldview comes first and is influencing the interpretation of science.
My deep regret is some people are so deeply entrenched in their own worldviews
that they will simply not countenance alternatives.
I'm actually a person of the left, and not even a particularly religious
person.
I think of myself as kind of humanist.
And I think it's sending a very bad message to religious people who are
interested in science, that in some sense, in order to do science credibly,
they have to leave their religious beliefs at the door.
The founders of early modern science, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle,
Johannes Kepler, Galileo, most of these early scientists all not only believed in
God, but they thought their belief in God actually made it easier to do science.
You can be religiously motivated, and you can do good science.
And they have more often gone together than not gone together.
Admitting our biases is the best way towards rational discussion, which I would
welcome.
Rational debate is a nice thought, but it's nearly impossible in the current
climate.
I'd seen the chilling effect that this unquestioning devotion to Darwinism has
had on science.
But were there other consequences?
No gods, no life after death, no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning
in life, and no human free will, are all deeply connected to an
evolutionary perspective.
You're here today, and you're gone tomorrow.
And that's all there is to it.
Dr. Will Provine, professor of the history of biology at Cornell University,
gave us another disturbing glimpse into where Darwinism can lead.
Oh, I was a Christian, but I never heard anything about evolution because it was
illegal to teach it in Tennessee.
Dr. Provine's first biology professor changed all that.
He started talking about evolution as if it had no design in it whatsoever.
And I came up to him and I said, you've left out the most important part.
And he said, if you feel the same way at the end of one quarter, I want you to
stand up in front of the students in this class and tell them this deep lack in
evolution.
And I read that book so carefully, I could find no sign of there being any
design whatsoever in evolution.
And I immediately began to doubt the existence of the deity.
But it starts by giving up an active deity.
Then it gives up the hope that there's any life after death.
When you give those two up, the rest of it follows fairly easily.
You give up the hope that there's an imminent morality.
And finally, there's no human free will.
If you believe in evolution, you can't hope for there being any free will.
There's no hope whatsoever of there being any deep meaning in human life.
We live, we die, and we're gone.
We're absolutely gone when we die.
Dr. Provine is no stranger to the prospect of death.
Nearly a decade ago, he was diagnosed with a large brain tumor.
Let's suppose my tumor comes back, as it almost certainly will.
Well, I'm not going to sit around like my older brother did last year, and he was
dying of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease.
He wanted desperately to die, but we couldn't help him die.
I don't want to die like that.
I'm going to shoot myself in the head long before then.
I'm going to do something different.
I hope these are empty words for my friend, Dr. Provine, because shortly after
this interview was recorded, he learned his brain tumor had returned.
I don't feel one bit bad about holding the views that I do.
There's not anything in the views I hold that makes me, oh, I wish I had free will,
or oh, I wish there were a God.
I don't ever, ever wish that.
Dr. Provine's deconversion story was typical amongst the Darwinists we
interviewed.
Biologist P.Z.
Myers, who runs the pro-Darwin, anti-religion blog Ferengula, says science
eroded his faith as well.
I never hated religion.
I found religion quite comfortable, and I liked the people in it.
What led to the atheism was learning more about science, learning more about the
natural world, and seeing these horrible conflicts with religion.
And it was then, when I discovered evolution, when I discovered Darwinism,
that I realized there's this magnificently elegant, stunningly elegant explanation,
which I didn't quite understand to begin with.
When I did understand it, then that finally killed off my remaining religious
faith.
After hearing these stories, I was not surprised to discover that most
evolutionary biologists share Professor Dawkins' views.
It appears Darwinism does lead to atheism, despite what Eugenie Scott would have us
believe.
And if you separate out the ethical message from religion, what have you got
left?
You've got a bunch of fairy tales, right?
I think that God is about as unlikely as fairies, angels, hobgoblins, etc.
Religion, I mean, it's just fantasy, basically.
It's completely empty of any explanatory content.
And it's evil as well.
Half the people in this country think that drugs is what you have to regulate to make
us safer, and half the people think guns, that's what you've got to regulate to make
us safer.
But I always think, if you're going to regulate one thing that has the most
potential to cause death and destruction, religion.
You've got to start with religion.
Religion is an idea that gives some people comfort, and we don't want to take it away
from them.
It's like knitting.
People like to knit.
We're not going to take their knitting needles away.
We're not going to take away their churches.
But what we have to do is get it to a place where religion is treated at the
level it should be treated.
That is, something fun that people get together and do on the weekend,
and really doesn't affect their life as much as it has been so far.
So, what would the world look like if Dr. Myers got his wish?
Greater science literacy, which is going to lead to the erosion of religion.
And then we'll get this nice positive feedback mechanism going, where as
religion slowly fades away, we get more and more science to replace it.
And that will displace more and more religion, which will allow more and more
science in.
And we'll eventually get to that point where religion has taken that appropriate
place as side dish, rather than the main course.
But will eradicating religion really lead to a modern utopia?
Hmm.
Let me try to imagine that.
And let's let history be our guide.
In part, I think Matthew Arnold put his hands on it when he spoke about the
withdrawal of faith.
There is a connection between a society that has at least a minimal commitment to
certain kinds of transcendental values, and what human beings permit themselves to
do one to the other.
That got me thinking, what other societies have used Darwinism to trump all other
authorities, including religion?
As a Jew, my mind leapt to one regime in particular.
The connection between Hitler and Darwin is, of course, historically a difficult
connection, because they were separated by a good many years.
One was English, one was German.
Nonetheless, if you open Mein Kampf and read it, especially if you can read it in
German, the correspondence between Darwinian ideas and Nazi ideas just leaps
from the page.
Of course, you have to add every historical caution.
Not everyone who read Darwin became a Nazi.
Obviously not.
No one is making that case.
Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think
it's certainly a necessary one.
This was a connection I had to explore personally.
Officers
arrive at a Nazi institution seized by First Army troops.
Under the guise of an insane asylum, this has been the headquarters for the
systematic murder.
So what is this place?
During the Second World War, 15,000 people were killed here.
Why were they killed?
They were killed because they were people with handicaps.
Why kill them?
What's the point of killing them?
People who were not able to work, people who were not able to live by
themselves, that they were useless eaters.
Useless eaters.
And life unworthy of living.
This idea grew up in the 20s, so long before National Socialism.
Biologists, anthropologists, they thought that maybe mankind could, or the
government could interfere into the growth of the population.
I see.
And they had the utopia.
Utopia.
Utopia, that they would have a society without illness and without handicap.
So this was a Darwinian concept.
Yes.
And also a Malthusian concept, very much Malthusian.
Malthusian.
Thomas Malthus, who said that there was a shortage of resources.
English philosopher, so there was a shortage.
Yes, but the Nazi, they relied on Darwin.
They relied on Darwin.
Yes, Darwin and German scientists.
Patients were led down this hallway to Nazi doctors who decided who would live
and who would die.
They were accompanied by 15 nurses.
Nurses, yes.
Nurses, male and female nurses.
So nurses were helping lead them to their doom.
Yes.
So were the prisoners told they were taking a shower?
Yes, they were taking a shower and here was one or two showers.
So how many people were brought into this room?
60 to 70.
So what is this?
This is the dissection table.
Do you ever think to yourself, the sane ones were the ones lying here
having their brains removed?
The insane one was Dr. Gorgas and all the other people.
No, no, I don't think that because I think those people who killed here, they were
very sane because they had their purposes.
They had purposes.
Yes, I don't think they were insane.
They had two crematory ovens.
I see.
And they killed about 70 people.
A day.
So a day, so they had...
That's barely enough time.
They only killed from Monday to Friday, so...
Because the people who were doing the killing needed to have the weekend off.
If you met Dr. Gorgas today, what would you say to him?
I don't know.
I don't think that it's my role to tell him something.
It's difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,
to know that these cold stone and tile walls were the last things the victims of
Hadamar ever saw.
I wanted to explore this connection further, so I met with the author of From
Darwin to Hitler, Dr. Richard Weikart.
Hitler and many of the physicians that carried out this program were very
fanatical Darwinists, and particularly wanted to apply Darwinism to society.
What we want from the German youth of the future is something different from what
the past wanted.
We need a new human being.
So that our people don't have the typical degenerative effects of this new era.
Many of these people in the 19-teens, 1920s, who were putting forward some of
these ideas about racism, were considered the leading scientists.
These were Darwinists who were taken seriously by fellow academics.
It's not to say that all academics believed it.
These leading academics, were there any of them who were Americans?
There were plenty of Americans who were saying similar kinds of things.
Not only were Americans saying such things, they were pioneers in this
fledgling science known as eugenics.
They thought they could help evolution along by sterilizing the so-called
feeble-minded, and prohibiting them from getting married.
Physicians who are aware of the history of 20th century American medicine,
harbor some bad feelings towards Darwinists because of eugenics.
And eugenics, which was an attempt to breed human beings, it was the darkest
chapter of American medicine ever.
There were 50,000 people involuntarily sterilized because they were deemed unfit
to breed, basically.
Eugenics isn't just history.
The spirit of the movement lives on today.
Margaret Sanger was the head of Planned Parenthood.
She was very fanatical in her promotion of eugenics.
In fact, Planned Parenthood was all about birth control for the impoverished and
lower classes to try to help improve the species.
From Hadamar, I traveled with Dr. Weikart to Dachau, where the Nazis applied the
ideas of eugenics on a massive mechanistic scale.
When it was a fully functioning concentration camp, what was the purpose
of it?
I mean, part of it was to repress political enemies.
What was the rest of the purpose?
Well, beyond the repression of the political enemies, which was its purpose
at the very beginning, then later on it transformed into repressing racial
enemies.
And sometimes those categories overlapped because sometimes they thought that these
people were political enemies because they were inferior biologically.
The war itself was part of the Darwinian struggle for existence for Hitler.
And he saw the extermination of the Jews as one of those fronts to this warfare
going on as this Darwinian struggle for existence.
Would you say that Hitler was insane?
No, I wouldn't say he was insane.
I think he had imbibed some very, very wrong ideas.
And in fact, I think he took the logic of them in certain ways that brought him to
take very radical solutions for them.
Would you say he was evil?
Oh, I'd definitely say he was evil.
Is there such a thing as evil?
Oh, I think there is.
And is there such a thing as good?
Oh, definitely.
And evil can sometimes be rationalized as science.
Oh, sure.
And evil can sometimes be rationalized... when it's rationalized as science,
and I think when it's rationalized in this particular way in particular, I think
Hitler thought he was doing good.
He thought he was doing good.
Oh, I think so.
He thought he was benefiting humanity by driving evolution forward and creating a
better humanity.
Before leaving Dachau, I stopped by the memorial commemorating the thousands of
Jews who were killed there in excruciating conditions.
I know that Darwinism does not automatically equate to Nazism,
but if Darwinism inspired and justified such horrific events in the past,
could it be used to rationalize similar initiatives today?
There's a good German expression, So fängt es immer ein.
I mean, it always begins in the same way.
Something to remember in the context of United States discussions of euthanasia
and abortion.
It always begins in the same way.
There seems to be an excellent argument for getting rid of useless people by
killing them.
Or at least it seems excellent to the people advancing the argument.
It's a love affair with death and, you know, the euthanasia and this movement
going on, which I find appalling.
And the idea is that, you know, immediately rid our society of anybody who
might be a drain and think of people in economic terms.
And I think that's where some of the Darwin fits in, actually.
It's just a devaluing of human life.
First of all, if you take seriously that evolution has to do with, you know,
the transition of life forms and that life and death are just natural processes,
then one gets to be liberal about abortion and euthanasia.
All of those kinds of ideas seem to me follow very naturally from a Darwinian
perspective.
A deprivileging of human beings, basically.
And I think that people who want to endorse Darwinism have to sort of take
this kind of viewpoint very seriously.
And when we see an elite, and it is an elite, an elite that controls essentially
all the research money in science, saying there is no such thing as moral
truth, science will not be related to religion.
I mean, it's essentially official policy of the National Academy of Science that
religion and science will not be related.
I mean, hey, you know, that cuts off a lot of debate, doesn't it?
What's going to happen if this doesn't change?
Well, I think we're watching it happen, aren't we?
I needed time to think.
So I traveled to the birthplace of this idea.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of
elimination.
We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick.
Thus, the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must
be highly injurious to the race of man.
Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871.
Throughout the Cold War in Germany, there was this wall erected to keep ideas
out.
It was erected by people who held an ideology, that were afraid of a
competition from other ideas that would come into their society.
And what we're seeing happening in science today is very much like that.
But I think that's just a strategy for protecting a failing ideology from
competition.
America didn't become the great nation that it is by suppressing ideas.
It progressed by allowing freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry.
Thomas Jefferson got it right when he wrote, We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have given their lives to protect these values,
but now they're under threat once again.
It wasn't just scientists who were being expelled.
It was freedom itself, the very foundation of the American dream, the very foundation
of America.
If we allowed freedom to be expelled in science, where would it end?
The Darwinian establishment is so massive and so entrenched, it appears
impenetrable.
I couldn't bring it down myself, but I could at least confront those who
had expelled the scientists I'd met.
What would you say, if you had Eugenie Scott sitting next to you, what would you
say to her?
I would ask her, by what authority does she and those like her presume to declare
what is and is not science?
You know, he's sort of made himself martyr of the day.
They've gotten a lot of mileage out of, you know, poor Rick Sternberg.
We got lip service from the leadership of the Smithsonian, but I didn't feel they
ever followed through.
We went into the Smithsonian looking for answers, but we ran into the same stone
wall as Congressman Souter.
He said, nonetheless, you have to be disciplined, and I lost my job.
We did get an interview with a spokesman from George Mason, but it was impossible
to knock him off his script.
Her contract was not renewed.
It was simply not renewing her contract, which she satisfied.
Her contract was not renewed, had nothing to do with the controversy of that topic
of intelligent design.
I have never been treated like this in my about 30 years in academia.
We received a similar reception at Baylor University.
They refused to admit that what had happened to Dr. Marks had anything to do
with I.D.
Certainly the conversations I've had, this has not, the intelligent design
situation has not been the thrust of the conversation.
It's a procedural issue, and that's the way we dealt with it.
Funny, that's not how Dean Kelly put things in his original email to Dr. Marks.
The questions that I ask in my intelligent design research are perfectly legitimate
scientific questions.
At least the top guns at Iowa State were willing to own up to their actions.
What we wanted to stop is the use of the name of ISU to validate intelligent
design, and we did succeed.
I really think a lot of Guglielmo.
He's a great guy.
So, I mean, that's why I'm kind of disappointed.
All right, that he should have just left this alone.
In my opinion, should have just left it alone.
Dr. Halpton elaborated further on his great regard for Gonzales.
This is quoting an email from you to Mr. Avalos.
You say, sometimes it is just best to ignore idiots, in reference to Guillermo.
And then the religious nutcases should be challenged at every opportunity.
Yeah, because, for example, you...
In that case, I'm thinking more of, say, the creationist crowd, who claims
that God put all the animals on an ark and that's it.
All right?
That's where all of our animals came from today.
That's crazy.
Okay?
You shouldn't be insulting even children with that kind of thing.
So, these are the idiots, all right?
They've always been around.
Going after the perpetrators in each of these cases wasn't getting me anywhere.
So, I reconnected with Dr. Berlinski and Dr. Schroeder to see if they had any
advice.
There's a boundary to what science will accept right now.
I think the parallel is exactly this wall coming down.
Ask any Berliner from the east side what it meant to have the wall come down.
If it is possible to make a break in the wall that will allow academia to ask these
fundamental questions that exist, and allow them in the science classrooms
as well.
It'd be nice to see the scientific establishment lose some of its prestige
and power.
It'd be nice to see other questions being opened up.
Above all, it'd be nice to have a real spirit of self-criticism penetrating the
sciences.
What can I do to bring down the wall?
Is there anything I can do?
Make it apparent to the world that a wall exists.
There are vast numbers of persons who talk about academic freedom.
And there is academic freedom, as long as you're on the correct side of
the wall.
But if you're on the wrong side of the wall, as we mentioned a few moments ago,
you lose tenure.
And that's a given.
I took Dr. Schroeder's words to heart.
Obviously, I couldn't take down the wall myself, but I could confront one of its
modern architects.
Hello, Professor Dawkins.
How are you?
I'm Ben Stein.
I'm so sorry to keep you waiting.
How are you?
Fine, thank you.
You have written that God is a psychotic delinquent invented by mad, deluded
people.
No, I didn't say quite that.
I said something rather better than that.
Please tell us what you said.
Well, I would have to read it from the book.
No, please.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all
fiction.
Jealous and proud of it.
A petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak.
A vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser.
A misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal,
pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent
bully.
So that's what you think of God?
Yeah.
How about if people believed in a God of infinite lovingness and kindness and
forgiveness and generosity, sort of like the modern-day God?
Why spoil it for them?
Oh...
Why not just let them have their fun and enjoy it?
I mean, I don't want to spoil anything for anybody.
I write a book.
People can read it if they want to.
I believe that it is a liberating thing to free yourself from primitive superstition.
So religion is a primitive superstition?
Oh, I think it is, yes.
So, you believe it's liberating to tell people that there is no God?
I think a lot of people, when they give up God, feel a great sense of release and
freedom.
Why do you think that?
I mean, what's your data?
What's your scientists, what's your data?
I think, well, I've had a lot of letters saying that.
There are 8 billion people in the world, Dr. Dawkins.
How many letters have you had?
No, I haven't done that.
That's quite true.
Professor Dawkins seemed so convinced that God doesn't exist that I wondered if he
would be willing to put a number on it.
Well, it's hard to put a figure on it, but, I mean, I'd put it as something like,
you know, 99% against or something.
Well, how do you know it's 99%?
I don't.
You're saying 97%.
You asked me to put a figure on it, and I'm not comfortable putting a figure
on it.
I think it's, I just think it's very unlikely.
What?
But you couldn't put a number on it?
No, of course not.
So it could be 49%.
Well, it would be, I mean, I think it's unlikely, but, and it's quite far from
50%.
How do you know?
I don't know.
I mean, I put an argument in the book.
Well, then who did create the heavens and the earth?
Why do you use the word who?
You see, you immediately beg the question by using the word who.
Well, then how did it get created?
Well, by a very slow process.
Well, how did it start?
Nobody knows how it got started.
We know the kind of event that it must have been.
We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.
And what was that?
It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.
Right, and how did that happen?
I told you, we don't know.
So you have no idea how it started?
No, no.
Nor has anybody.
Nor has anyone else.
What do you think is the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be
the answer to some issues in genetics or in evolution?
It could come about in the following way.
It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization
evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of
technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet.
Now, that is a possibility and an intriguing possibility.
And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that.
If you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology,
you might find a signature of some sort of designer.
Wait a second.
Richard Dawkins thought intelligent design might be a legitimate pursuit?
And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the
universe.
But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some
explicable or ultimately explicable process.
It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously.
That's the point.
So, Professor Dawkins was not against intelligent design, just certain types of
designers, such as God.
So, the Hebrew God, the God of the Old Testament, he doesn't exist in your view?
Certainly.
I mean, that would be a very unpleasant prospect.
And the holy trinity of the New Testament, that doesn't exist?
No, nothing like that.
Do you believe in any of the Hindu gods?
Like Vishnu?
How can you ask such a question?
How could I?
I mean, why would I, given that I don't believe in any others?
You don't believe in the Muslim god?
No.
Why do you even need to ask?
Well, I just wanted to be sure.
So, you don't believe in any god anywhere?
Any god anywhere would be completely incompatible with anything that I've said.
I understand.
I just wanted to make sure.
You don't believe in any god anywhere?
No.
What if, after you died, you ran into God?
He said, what have you been doing, Richard?
I mean, what have you been doing?
I've been trying to be nice to you.
I gave you a multi-million dollar paycheck over and over again with your book,
and look what you did.
Bertrand Russell had that point put to him, and he said something like,
sir, why did you take such pains to hide yourself?
But, if the intelligent design people are right, God isn't hidden.
We may even be able to encounter God through science, if we have the freedom to
go there.
What could be more intriguing than that?
We take freedom for granted here in the United States.
Freedom is what this country is all about.
And a huge part of freedom is freedom of inquiry.
But now, I'm sorry to say, freedom of inquiry in science is being suppressed.
Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city.
Part of a vast system of barriers.
There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box, where it
can't possibly touch a higher power, cannot possibly touch God.
Those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete,
dog runs and guard towers.
If you believe in God, and you believe that there is an intrinsic order in the
universe, and you believe that it's the role of science to try to pursue and
understand better that order, you will be ostracized.
I'm frightened by this, but I'm not going to let it stop me from investigating and
from speaking.
The wall cannot withstand freedom.
What I'm asking for is the freedom to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
My hope is that there will be enough independent thinking scientists who don't
like to be told what to think.
People on both sides of the argument being prepared to talk and listen.
And above all, a willingness to keep these dialogues open.
It might allow a lot of very good scientists to be scientists, who aren't
being allowed to be scientists right now.
I don't care what they end up as being.
I don't care if they end up being religious, a young earth creationist.
If they have thought their way through the issues and get there, I'm all for them.
And why do I think we're going to win in this struggle?
Because truth crushed to earth will rise again.
To find out what's true has a value all of its own.
If it has additional good consequences, so be it.
Because no lie can live forever.
I believe that science gives us one perspective on the world, and our
religious insight gives us another perspective on the world.
And by putting the two together, it will seem more deeply and more truly.
And if we will stand up for freedom...
Freedom is the victor.
If we all do that, we will overcome.
I've taken a first step by speaking out on this issue.
But if the wall is to come down, we all have to do our part.
Some of you will pay a heavy price for speaking out.
You may even lose your job.
I guarantee you'll get a e-mail.
But if you don't get involved, will anyone be left to carry the burden?