Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
John Derbyshire, the National Review writer who can be so absurd on other subjects but tends to be dead on when it comes to evolution and creationism, has a post at NRO about Expelled. He argues that the many deceptions and falsehoods in the film flow from one central deceit at the core of the ID movement, and I think he's right. Long excerpt below the fold.
My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.Now, there is nothing wrong with that. We are a nation of pressure groups, and one more would hardly notice. However, since parents who want their kids religiously educated already have plenty of private and parochial schools to choose from (half the kids on my street have attended parochial school), as well as the option of home schooling, now very well organized and supported (and heartily approved of by me: I just wish I knew how they find the time); and since current jurisprudence, how correctly I am not competent to say, regards tax-funded religious instruction as unconstitutional; creationists are a pressure group without hope, if they campaign openly for the thing they want.
Understanding this, the creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as "intelligent design," roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as "alternative science" engaged in a "controversy" with a closed-minded, reactionary "science establishment" fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all!
I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The "intelligent design" crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles. It's by no means all of them, but it's enough to corrupt and poison the creationist enterprise, which might otherwise have added something worthwhile to our national life, if only by way of entertainment value.
Hard to disagree with much of that. The old-fashioned young earthers did have the false pretense that the Bible can be proven solely by looking at the science, but that pretense was easily shredded. When push came to shove and the evidence lined up against them, they would resort to honesty and admit that they didn't really care what the evidence says, faith was more important. Most of the ID crowd believes that too, but you won't get them to admit it. And they've worked so long and hard to establish this veneer of being religiously neutral, a baldfaced lie if ever there was one, that they can no longer distinguish reality from fiction.
Comments
Hmm. I'm really not convinced by this. I don't think the old-style creationists were any more honest than the ID movement. From Gish and his bullfrogs, to Hovind and his...well, everything, really, they weren't exactly paragons of virtue. I think Derbyshire's got it exactly backwards - creationists decided to fly under the radar precisely because they were dishonest, rather than the reverse.
As to why creationists tend towards dishonesty, I think a reasonable case can be made that they are consequentialists, so that to them the act of lying is justified if it leads to a sufficiently positive outcome. This would also explain why the spurious 'Darwin to Hitler' argument gets so much play, since it's just the same argument in reverse; if evolution leads to a morally negative outcome, it must be false. Not as unreasonable as it sounds, when one believes that every aspect of the physical world is an expression of a morally perfect being's personality.
Posted by: MartinM | April 30, 2008 9:43 AM
Posted by: Tegumai Bopsulai, FCD | April 30, 2008 10:13 AM
@MartinM
I disagree that creationists are all consequentialists. Those that are consequentialists are of a perniciously naive variety, that takes a very narrow and skewed view of human good. But they are not representative of a more intelligent consequentialism. Even simple utilitarianism is more morally justified - it takes into consideration the whole of a person's life, and doesn't disregard any suffering in the world in favor of eternal bliss in Heaven (ok, maybe that's a little fast - perfect bliss for eternity would weigh pretty heavily in a utilitarian calculation).
But I think that most creationists are deontologists, although again, perniciously naive deontologists. They have their rules and duties, given to them directly by God, and will follow them regardless of the costs, like Abraham sacrificing his son. One major problem we have with them is that we apply rational standards to any rules and duties we may adopt, and have a more this-worldly sense of human goods, while they take faith in other-worldly good as primary, and so come up with vastly different sets of duties.
Posted by: SteveWH | April 30, 2008 10:24 AM
I think what Derbyshire meant by "honest" in describing the old school of creationism was not that they never lied, but that they did not attempt to hide the purpose of their movement--which was to put the Bible back in schools. Creationism prior to Edward v. Aguillard was explicitly Biblical--they didn't try to hide the fact that their goals were religious. The cdesign proponentsists who evolved following the End-Creation Science extinction event are just as Biblical as their predecessors, but their entire MO is to hide their biblicism at all costs.
And I think Derbyshire is right--this new level of dishonesty just makes the movement even more poisonous. It forces them to speak two languages: one, an explicitly religious language which they use around fellow Christianists, and the other an attenuated, watered down cargo cult "science" which they use in secular settings. The whole point of creationism now is to distort the national discourse as much as possible, and in order for it to work it requires all their supporters to participate in the lie (recall Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber at the Dover trial lying about their explicitly religious statements). The old creationism didn't require the average Joe to be so fundamentally dishonest about his religious motives.
Posted by: Wes | April 30, 2008 10:50 AM
He makes good points, but keep in mind this is the same guy who called eugenics "a respectable field of discussion and inquiry until tainted by association with Nazi "race science""
Posted by: Boo | April 30, 2008 12:34 PM
And a source for that would probably be good- my apologies:
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/feb03/huxley.htm
Posted by: Boo | April 30, 2008 12:36 PM
Well, Boo, as the old saying has it, even a stopped watch is correct twice a day. Derbyshire is most certainly a loon in many ways, but he's right in this instance.
Posted by: Sadie Morrison | April 30, 2008 7:38 PM
I really can't agree with Derb here: the whole creationist movement is part and parcel of something bigger that was fundamentally dishonest -- if not deranged -- from the beginning: the desire to uphold and perpetuate one religion via state power, to outlaw and silence all other religions, and to undermine the very ability of humans to think rationally and independently. As MartinM and Tegumai said, the creationists chose a dishonest tactic (not for the first time either) because they were dishonest from the start.
Posted by: Raging Bee | April 30, 2008 9:53 PM
My two daughters go to parochial schools.
I don't agree with everything taught there, but then again public schools have their own agendas too.
And in our are they are cesspools of drugs and crime. 11 and 13 year old girls have to be given a chance to at least be able to grow up enough to defend themselves from the massess of scum.
Don't like that? Tough cookies, but the public swills aren't getting my kids.
Posted by: Shoula | May 1, 2008 5:47 AM
Don't like that? Tough cookies, but the public swills aren't getting my kids.
As far as I can tell, the article isn't about public vs. parochial schools, and I doubt anyone here wants to dictate which school your kids can go to. Your implication that your kids are getting taught creationism instead of evolution is unfortunate, but ultimately it only harms them. They'll find it harder to get into and succeed at colleges, as for example the University of California system, if they've been fed creationist lies at the expense of science. You also might want to consider the impact on their faith (assuming that's one of the reasons they're in parochial schools) if they ever do happen to learn about evolution and realize that their good Christian educators lied to them.
Of course, the implication that most people are "masses of scum" was kind of offensive, yes. Not very Christian either.
Posted by: Boo | May 1, 2008 7:28 AM