The True Story Behind Ben Stein’s Anti-Evolution/Pro-Intelligent Design Film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

BY KEVIN MILLER

The 2008 documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was released to widespread media coverage and hype. Starring Ben Stein—a conservative commentator, actor, and former speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—the film argued there was a conspiracy within academia to censor Intelligent Design (ID) and to cover up evidence that belief in evolutionary theory led to everything from atheism to the Nazi Holocaust. Expelled opened in over 1,300 theaters and earned nearly $8 million. In addition to ID theorists, the film included interviews with noted proponents of evolutionary theory such as Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer.

As the film’s co-writer, I was part of the crew that came to the Skeptic magazine office to interview Michael Shermer. Here is how he described his experience with us:

Ben Stein came to my office to interview me about what I was told was a film about “the intersection of science and religion” called Crossroads (yet another deception). I knew something was afoot when his first question to me was on whether or not I think someone should be fired for expressing dissenting views. I pressed Stein for specifics: Who is being fired for what, when, and where? In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence, or not fulfilling the terms of a contract. Stein finally asked my opinion on people being fired for endorsing Intelligent Design. I replied that I know of no instance where such a firing has happened.

This seemingly innocent observation was turned into a filmic confession of ignorance when my on-camera interview abruptly ends there, because when I saw Expelled at a preview screening at the National Religious Broadcasters’ convention (tellingly, the film is being targeted primarily to religious and conservative groups), I discovered that the central thesis of the film is a conspiracy theory about the systematic attempt to keep Intelligent Design creationism out of American classrooms and culture.

Although I was in agreement with the film’s agenda at the beginning, throughout the long production process, my feelings about the project and the ID movement underwent a significant shift. But I stayed on board in the hope of providing a counterbalance to the producers’ desire to create what amounted to a piece of pro-ID propaganda. I eventually realized, however, that whoever controls the money controls the point of view, so there was only so much that I could do as a fledgling screenwriter.

Ben Stein faces off with one of his closest primate relatives (which creationists believe have no relation to humans).

In the years since Expelled came out, the transformation of my views has continued apace, so I wrote to Shermer to apologize for the damage the film did and the duplicitous circumstances under which some of our interviews were obtained. In response, he invited me to write an article describing my experience on Expelled as well as my subsequent reflections on the ID movement and the larger issue of the relation between science and religion.

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During the two and a half years I spent working on Expelled, one of the key dynamics I observed was how bitterly divided people were over the notion of ID as a concept, and even more so as a movement. After reading countless books and articles on the subject and participating in interviews with people on all sides, I realized that no matter which way one approached the topic of Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design—and by extension, science and religion—the individuals on the frontlines were virtually all highly intelligent people of goodwill. Unfortunately, some of the leading voices were also exceedingly argumentative by nature. Thus, rather than engage in dialogue that sought to establish common ground and then work together to build bridges toward truth, interactions between the ID movement and its critics often amounted to one side lobbing a verbal grenade at the other and then hunkering down in the trenches as it exploded, all the while chuckling about how foolish the folks on the other side were. Rather than emulate that spirit, I decided I would try to engage my critics in constructive conversation. I wanted to see if it was possible to cross no man’s land and find some sort of common bond with the “enemy.”