This 'movie' is a hypocrisy. ID proponents are stooping to anything to get 'god did it' taught in public schools. The hypocrisy is obvious, the IDers assume their christ is the god of choice even though there are millions of other unfalsifiable god(dess) creation theories out there and every single one of them is psuedoscience. As Ebon has stated, they can't ALL be RIGHT, but they could ALL be WRONG.

Chris - your post is essentially correct but misses the same point that many other rational thinkers do - that mankind is really at the very beginning of our learning curve in regards to understanding the universe around us. The automatic rejection of all things that we do not understand is not a feasible or even a practical option. Our cognizant inference systems would never permit it. That said, you are absolutely correct that any concepts not consistent with observed empirical realities must be discarded, inclusive of religious concepts. The latter is , of course, an enormous problem with the dogmatic religions. I might suggest that this is possibly the core difference between a 'religious' world view and a 'spiritual' world view.

I spent some time on the Expelled movie blog site a while back and I have to say it was a sobering experience. I was able to pull a couple of posters into a coherent, if brief, discussion although the best I think I accomplished was to cause some to re-think some of their mind sets (not a bad day in itself, I suppose). What is genuinely frightening is the amount of effort some will put into willful ignorance. It is absolutely stunning - an ongoing denial of the most obvious facts and proofs laid out before them. The film will play directly to those people. I'm concerned that this will be yet another contributor to the process that seems to be splitting the educated/rational/non-religious population from the less thoughtful religious devout population.

However, the production values (of the trailer at least) are high. And I fear that if you don't know him or the underhanded way he produced the movie, Stein comes off as a sympathetic guy who just happens to believe in god and who's investigating this very sad and wrong violation of free speech. It could have a powerful effect not only on its intended audience of true believers, but also on lots of others who are perhaps nominally religious and only marginally aware of the science education debate.

science in the strict sense does not carry theological implications

This is true only if you don't include in "science" a requirement that empiricism be the supreme principle of your personal epistemology. I'm not sure what kind of science you can practice while allowing empiricism to occasionally be trumped by other ways of knowing.

But if you *don't* allow that - if empiricism has to come first - then any theological position inconsistent with observed empirical realities must be abandoned, which includes a lot of theological positions that people actually hold.

It's certainly true that science doesn't mandate atheism - many scientists have been First Cause deists, and that position is still logically consistent (assuming you don't also construe science to include Occam's razor). But it does at least mean you aren't allowed to believe in things that have been *disproved*.

I think Matt Nisbet annoys me more than the creationists do. And really, it didn't have to be that way. He could have so easily stated his position in a way I would have agreed with. (See? Framing!) All he had to do was say that he acknowledges PZ's and Dawkins' right to believe and speak however they want, but he wants people to recognize that science itself has no inevitable theological consequences, that atheism is not the only possible result of accepting evolution, and here are some religious scientists who feel differently. That would have been so easy, and I don't think it would have brought nearly this much ridicule and opprobrium down on his head. Truth, I would have agreed with that.

But what he actually decided to do is not only stupid - did he seriously think for even a moment that he was going to get PZ to shut up? - it's also tactically unsound. He is the one who's helping the creationists, not PZ or Dawkins. His frantic attempts to hush the atheists make it seem as if our very existence is some kind of dirty secret that we should be trying to hide. Of course the enemies of science can use that. There's a reason that the Uncommon Descent weblog favorably quotes him and not PZ: he helps their cause more than PZ does. If he had done what I suggested above - acknowledge the existence of atheists, but point out that there are religious scientists too - then he'd have denied the creationists that opportunity. Being an atheist is not wrong; it's nothing we need to hide. When Nisbet acts as if it is, he's playing right into the creationists' hands. For a supposed master of the art of framing, he seems oblivious to the fact that he's actually reinforcing their frames. PZ and Dawkins, by taking a stand for atheism and refusing to back down, are doing the rhetorical work that really needs to be done.

The fact of the matter is, there are scientists who are atheists, and they have every right to say that. In fact, they should say that. The ID advocates are the only ones who are trying to hide their real motivations. We shouldn't need to. As I said, science in the strict sense does not carry theological implications. If we did what Nisbet suggested, the result would be atheist scientists who were keeping quiet about what they really believed. That would be a juicy opportunity for creationists, to try to ferret out the "secret" that science supposedly leads to atheism, and quote-mine the few scientists who let that fact slip out to press a claim against us. In short, Nisbet's approach would burden us with unnecessary baggage. It would make non-religious scientists into liabilities to the cause of science, rather than the assets they so clearly are. His maddening, irrational refusal to recognize that is why his approach irritates me so much.

I hadn't actually heard what the story was until now. Thanks, Ebonmuse. The whole thing reminds me of a song my dad, a christian and a bluegrass musician, played when I was a kid called, "Everybody Else but Me". (It's about how God's commands apply to everybody else but the singer.)