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Premise Media is a film production company based in British Columbia, Canada. According to its website, Premise Media “develops, finances, and produces independent films, books, and DVD’s [sic] for the domestic and international marketplace.” Its motto is “Producing world class media that stirs the heart and inspires the minds to truth, purpose, and hope.”

Premise Media’s top management consists of two men. A. Logan Craft is Chairman of the Board of Directors and a Presbyterian minister from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also produced a television show called “Church and State TV.” Walt Ruloff is Premise Media’s CEO. Prior to joining Premise Media, Ruloff was a salesman and entrepreneur who founded the software company ILTS in 1991, later selling it to Microsoft. Craft and Ruloff also appear to be the source of much of the funding for Premise Media and for Expelled.

Additional staff listed on Premise Media’s website included several that are associated with Rampant Films, including Mark Mathis. Also of interest is Paul Lauer, who is listed as the “Grassroots Marketing Director.” Lauer is the founder of Motive Marketing, an entertainment marketing firm that specializes in promoting entertainment geared towards the faith and family markets. Motive Marketing was behind such grassroots marketing campaigns as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and Walden Media/Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Lauer himself is described on the Motive Marketing website as “one of the most well connected entrepreneurs in the faith and family market.”

The connections between Premise Media and Motive Marketing, as well as the strong religious background of Craft, all point to a religiously motivated film. It is not surprising, then, to find that Expelled is not an unbiased documentary, but rather a movie with a clear religious agenda: to attack mainstream science, falsely presenting it as being anti-religious.

Of course, Premise Media has a free speech right to promote its views, religious or otherwise, and nobody is objecting to its exercise of that right. But its critics have a right to correct the record. And part of that record is the attempt to pass off to the public as a “documentary” a film that is clear propaganda.

Marketing with a Motive
Documentaries in general – even relative “blockbusters” like those of Michael Moore or Al Gore – reach a remarkably small proportion of the American public. The religious goals of the producers of Expelled will not be met if the movie appeals only to conservative Christians, the movie’s natural base. To make Expelled successful will require creating a “buzz” that will attract mainstream viewers.

Motive Marketing is an obvious choice for the grassroots marketing that is essential to the success of a movie like Expelled. This company was successful in applying viral marketing techniques to promote Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Walden Media/Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and their skills (plus those of three other PR firms) are being employed to promote Expelled.

Giving the impression that people are flocking to see Expelled requires a big opening weekend, and the team at Motive Marketing is striving to inflate the number of tickets sold in three ways:

The Expelled Challenge
In the “Expelled Challenge,” the makers of Expelled offer to pay Christian schools by reimbursing them for their tickets based on how many students attend. On their website, described as a “site specifically designed for students, teachers, pastors, youth leaders and organizations to provide useful tools and resources to promote the ideas surrounding this highly anticipated film”, the following enticement appears:

“What is the Expelled Challenge?

To engage Christian schools and home school groups to get as many students, parents, and faculty from their school/group out to see Ben Stein’s new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (opening in theaters April 2008).

Each school/home group that registers through the link below and submits their ticket stubs will be eligible for a donation as funds permit, but the school that submits the most ticket stubs will win a donation of $10,000!”

It remains to be seen how many schools have taken up the Expelled crew on their offer, or how many donations “funds permit”. However, offering to pay people to see their film seems to be, at best, a bad business model. It is, however, an excellent way to encourage a large turnout for the first weekend’s take.

Political screenings
Another way the producers of Expelled can increase that important opening weekend attendance is to stir up controversy over the film. Unfortunately, they have chosen to do so by exacerbating one of the most unfortunate trends in American society today: the politicization of education. There have been at least two private screenings for state legislatures that have anti-evolution bills on the docket. One was held to drum up support for Florida’s Senate Bill 2692: the so-called “Evolution Academic Freedom Act”, which aims to encourage the teaching of creationism by providing legal protection to educators who present “alternatives to evolution” (i.e., intelligent design and/or creation science ). Another screening was held in Missouri, where two similar bills, House Bills 2554 and 1315, aim to promote “academic freedom” and “protect intellectual diversity”; the latter bill was introduced by a legislator who previously introduced a bill that would have fired teachers who didn’t give equal time to intelligent design.

Though the showings were not as well-attended as the makers of Expelled might like you to believe, these events still illustrate Premise Media’s disturbing willingness to politicize science.

Planting Reviews
Another way to swell the first weekend’s gate is to hype the movie by salting reviews from friendly sources. Those who signed up for the Expelled newsletter updates began receiving promotional materials for the film in late March. Newsletters were peppered with stellar reviews from various conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved who resonate with conservative audiences. Medved, in addition, is a Senior Fellow at the intelligent design-promoting Discovery Institute, heralded in the film; it is unsurprising that he would be an Expelled enthusiast. These positive reviews from conservative pundits and similar friendly sources are useful in helping the marketing company reach the base of conservative Christians.

However, other positive reviews seem to be from actual movie critics. Ted Baehr of Movieguide says “Four stars!” For someone who has not heard of Movieguide, it may sound more legitimate and unbiased than conservative pundits like Limbaugh or Medved. However, a little research reveals that “Movieguide” is a misleadingly neutral title.

Movieguide is a “ministry dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media according to biblical principles, by influencing entertainment industry executives and helping families make wise media choices” (according to their website). Such conservative evangelical reviewers will be sympathetic to Expelled’s religious message, and less likely to be familiar with the existing arguments against its distortions of science and history. To draw as many people to the movie theaters as possible, it makes sense for Motive Marketing to promote reviews of its film from such sites – and ignore negative reviews from mainstream movie critics (available here)

Of course, it is not unusual for a marketing company to promote a movie – that’s exactly what they’re hired for. And none of this promotion is illegal or necessarily unethical. But only time, not artificially inflated turnout statistics, will tell whether Expelled has the “legs” of successful documentaries such as those of Michael Moore – but we predict that it will have a several-year career in church basements.

How many movies have you seen that actually cause the audience to break into applause?

How many movies have you seen that actually cause the audience to break into applause?

Star Wars...the first time back in 1977. Half a dozen others... is that a criterion for academic truth?

Pillock.

Star Wars...the first time back in 1977. Half a dozen others... is that a criterion for academic truth?

More importantly, it shows us that we cannot trust anything just because millions of people believe it, only that it is a good story and the director of the movie and the author of the book are good storytellers. Great. All we know about Darwin is that he's a good story-teller. Way to go.

More importantly, it shows us that we cannot trust anything just because millions of people believe it, only that it is a good story and the director of the movie and the author of the book are good storytellers. Great. All we know about Darwin is that he's a good story-teller. Way to go.

Further, as someone who usually gives the impression of espousing logic and reason while still embracing his belief, I cannot understand how you can feel glib about responding with anything but scorn for a propaganda piece of such nature as this one that puts evolutionary biology on notice as being responsible for the Holocaust.

Care to explain?

That argument would seem to also cut the legs from under a belief in the Abrahamic religions also, based on the idea that the books that underpin those religions can't be trusted merely because millions of people believe in them. After all, said books are good stories, and the authors of said books are good story tellers.

I'd rather know a wicked person who KNOWS he's a wicked person, than a righteous person who THINKS he's a righteous person.

Lacking one detail? If the dog was not capable of jumping out of its own way yesterday but today leaps over counters in a single bound, then it is more then one little detail.

The evolutionist says it changed all by itself.....by magic, whereas an ID'er looks for an external agency that brought about the change.

Now, I think that blaming ALL of evolutionary biology as being the cause of the Holocaust is quite extreme, just like I would consider blaming Bohr's model of the atom, Mendeleyev's Periodic Table and Einstein's Energy Equation, for Chernobyl, Sellafield, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. But I would definitely consider that they had an effect, because Einstein said that if he knew what would his ideas would be used for, he would have never published them and become a watchmaker.

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!


Shermer wrote to Mr J to ask if he had by any chance just seen Expelled, and he received this reply:


Yes I have. You know, I respect you as a human being and you have done great work exposing psychics and frauds, but this is a very touchy issue that affects me and family emotionally. Our family business was affected because of Auschwitz because now, our family has nothing. It is gone. Things began to make sense once I saw the movie and I am just appalled. I have learned a lot from Ben Stein, a Jewish brother, who has opened my eyes up a bit.


It seemed to me that Ben Stein and his lying crew were more to blame than Mr J himself for his revolting letter. I therefore decided to write him a personal letter and try to explain a few things to him. It then occurred to me (indeed, Michael Shermer suggested as much) that there are probably many others like him, whose minds have been twisted in this evil way by the man Stein, and that it would be a good idea to publish the letter. I decided to wait 24 hours to see if he would reply, although I didn't expect him to. I am now publishing my letter to him, exactly as I sent it to him except that I have removed his name.

Richard

Dear Mr J

Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein's mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.

1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don't think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer.

Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I'll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.

2. Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain, by the way. What singled Hitler out was the fact that he somehow managed to come to power in one of Europe's leading nations, which was also one of the world's most technologically advanced nations. Hitler had a lot of support in Germany. His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist. It is sometimes said that Hitler only pretended to be Catholic, in order to win the Church's support for his regime. In this he was very largely successful. So, whether or not Hitler was himself a true Catholic (as he often claimed) the Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf.


Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.

Hitler's obscene anti-Semitism was able to hold sway in Germany because there was a deeply embedded history of anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed in Europe generally.

3. Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can't seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany. The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?

4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.

5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).

6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.

7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.

8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.

With my good wishes, and sympathy for the losses your family suffered in the Holocaust.

Yours sincerely

Richard Dawkins

However, it was quite a shock to me when I discovered that Hitler got the idea for his concept of extermination of the Jews from the Americans who sterilised many poor Americans and many disable Americans in the 20s and 30s, under the basis of the theory of Eugenics, that they could "weed out" the poor and the disabled, because both were the results of bad genetics.

However, it was quite a shock to me when I discovered that Hitler got the idea for his concept of extermination of the Jews from the Americans who sterilised many poor Americans and many disable Americans in the 20s and 30s, under the basis of the theory of Eugenics, that they could "weed out" the poor and the disabled, because both were the results of bad genetics.

However, it really does explain Hitler's policies quite a bit...

"The task of preserving and advancing the highest humanity, given to this earth by the benevolence of the Almighty, seems a truly high mission (Hitler 1943, 398).

The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise. (Hitler 1943, 383)

What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, . . . so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. (Hitler 1943, 214)

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord (Hitler 1943, 65).

It's a wonderful movie. Go see it. It's a breath of fresh air from all the atheist evolution nonsense.

How many movies have you seen that actually cause the audience to break into applause?

No, I believe the scientific term for Stein's affliction is "cognitive dissonance." "Jack shit" is just a word we use to mock his ignorance. And yes, spreading lies and ****ing with the education of future generations is worthy of this kind of contempt.

Posted by saintgasoline
Now, to deny that the dog ate the cake because you personally can't conceive how the dog got on the table is--to put it bluntly--idiotic in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the theory doesn't explain yet whether the dog jumped straight up to the counter with a rush of adrenaline, or possibly used a nearby chair, or maybe even knocked it off the counter somehow. The fact that this is not explained does nothing to the evidence that shows that the dog nevertheless at the cake.

Sticking with your analogy here, the ID'ers don't deny that the dog ate the cake. As you say it is obvious it did, however they bring a potential fourth alternative to the table as to how the dog may have had the ability to reach the cake. By your own admission, you're not sure how the dog was able to, so to reject another alternative seems silly, close-minded and ultimately unscientific. If the dog was on trial in a court of law, the possibility that he had an accomplice would be a legitimate line of investigation which if it wasn't followed up on, the prosecutor would likely be fired for.
Even if in the majority of cases it is determined that no accomplice or mastermind was involved, they don't automatically assume that it never is. In fact there have been convictions in spite of the fact that the accomplice was never identified or apprehended but known to have been involved because there was no other plausable method for the "crime" to have been committed.

In any other field other then the mainstream biological sciences, the norm is to leave "no stone unturned" during investigations. That evolutionists fight so hard to not investigate the ID position and in fact criticize and condemn those that do, leaves some of us to think that they are either afraid to do so, or have something to hide.

More importantly, it shows us that we cannot trust anything just because millions of people believe it, only that it is a good story and the director of the movie and the author of the book are good storytellers. Great. All we know about Darwin is that he's a good story-teller. Way to go.

Sticking with your analogy here, the ID'ers don't deny that the dog ate the cake.

By your own admission, you're not sure how the dog was able to, so to reject another alternative seems silly, close-minded and ultimately unscientific.

The standard biographies of Hitler almost all point to the influence of Darwinism...

This view called “social Darwinism” is a logical extension of Darwinian evolutionary theory and was articulated by Darwin himself.

That's a load of crap ancientmuse. There are documentaries that show Hitler persecuted Christians and closed their churches everywhere he could.