"The film's premise is that narrow-minded scientists, in a concerted effort to eliminate God from all areas of scientific inquiry, have refused to accept the rock-solid scientific basis for Intelligent Design."

No, there is absolutely no evidence for any scientific-basis for intelligent design.  (Disclosure: I have a couple of degrees in the sciences).  

I'm also a Christian, and comfortable with my religion, but I don't buy into intelligent design any more than I buy into that idiot Tom Cruise and Scientology.  Evolution is a theory that's been around since Charles Darwin, intelligent design is a recent phenomenon that gained momentum for little reason.

To each his/her own, I guess, but I'm not one of those considering intelligent design as legitimate.

there's only one way to find out...

As per the "disingenuous" link:

Mark Mathis
Rampant Films
4414 Woodman Ave. #203
Sherman Oaks, CA 91423
www.rampantfilms.com

Send him a note to let him know that he's acted like a disingenuous cunt.

From the 3rd link...

Stein is perfectly situated to weigh in on this issue, as he is an actor, a pop-culture icon, and at the same time a serious economist who has worked in academia and the government.

Perfectly situated?  A actor, economist, pop-fucking-culture icon?  How?  This makes no sense.  Shit, by that logic, since I know a lot about teaching and now insurance, I guess that makes me "perfectly situated" to take out Ben Stein's kidney.

No?

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

"Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are."

So, exactly what evidence are scientists supposed to follow now?  Should they follow the evidence of carbon-dated fossils going back millions of years or the "evidence" presented in the bible which dates the entire age of the Earth as less than 10,000 years?  I was about to say that Stein was a smart guy but then I remembered he used to shill for Richard Nixon.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

I've never heard an ID proponent sufficiently explain why God, being an entity that is clearly quite complex, doesn't himself require a designer to explain his complexity.  After all, if you are going to claim that a simple flat worm is too complex to have resulted from anything other than the intelligent design of another being, how much more so God.  

The logical conclusion of ID is an infinite regression of ever more intelligent beings designing the designer.  I never read about that in the bible.

I'm going to need to go ahead and ask whatever creationist/ID proponent in this thread to go ahead and get me the contact information of their deity.

See, the thing is, I was talking to one of those laywers that runs those 1-800 personal injury legal services. Now, I may have been really drunk at the time this discussion happened but I'm pretty sure there are some serious product liability issues here.

I take issue with anybody who says the Human Body is such a masterpiece that it had to have been designed by somebody. Yeah... if they were hammered off their ass. Tell that line to some poor kid suffering from horrific juvenile cancer, or the lady slowly losing her quality of life from MS. Tell that to my golf buddies' kid who can't be in the same room as a peanut, lest he dies a horrible death. The immune system is a joke. Viruses such as HIV can be rendered nearly incurable by simply sticking themselves into our genome. If a creator was in charge of making all of us, wouldn't you think he'd cover these obvious holes in the human body? What about all of the slow degenerative diseases, or problems that arise from pathways suddenly not working anymore for no clear reason leading to amputated body parts and horrible "quality of life" (diabetes)? What idiot approved the Tay-Sachs mutant? What's his excuse? Wrong cover sheet on the TPS report? "Intelligent" design my eye.

Seriously. This whole intelligent design idea is retarded. How about we all just agree that evolution caused the inherent crappiness of the human body? I really don't want to clog up the court system with another giant class action civil lawsuit, and the ID proponents probably don't want to acknowledge that their "creator" was drinking on the job.

    Apparently the persecution just isn't going to stop, as invited journalists mock the lack of a forum for their questions at a recent press conference for the film. I guess you'll see what you want in this episode: Stein and crew probably expect nothing better from the scurvy dogs of the orthodoxy, and those being labeled restrictive are having a laugh at Ben's expense.
    Is it worth all the fuss? Read an interesting tidbit a while back arguing that ID should be greeted with some satisfaction by opponents of creationism, because it represents a surrender with a whimper rather than a serious new attack on evolution. (The parents of kids in districts where this is a contentious issue might disagree-slightly- with how serious is this impact.) On the witness stand, with the whole future of the ID endeavor on the line (at least when it came to getting into classrooms), a lead advocate could be made to sound rather timid. But then I guess "twisting words" can include direct quotation, eh?
    Lawrence Krauss seems to be on the right track in the attack on ID, even if he is abrasive at times . . though how to be polite to someone who you believe is willfully arguing nonsense remains a test for all sorts of forums, including TnT :) On a related note, would someone with a better grasp of the science be interested in doing a writeup on Krauss's recent challenges to String Theory? That strikes me as a rather more interesting discussion of scientific orthodoxy than anything related to this movie is likely to produce.
    Oh, last but not least, this seems an interesting example of an adaption of strategy by the ID movement, namely the co-opting of a favorite New Right tactic of making the persecution and not the issue the framing point of the discussion. Doesn't matter what your actual beliefs on the subject are-- as soon as you find out some dirty "liberals" are oppressing Americans, somewhere, it's time to get the dander up and make an appearance on Fox decrying this perfidy . . .

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

These ID people are demanding to be taken seriously by scientists, but so far, the only people who have even proposed a means that might somehow give the theory a little falsifiability don't even consider themselves part of the movement.  It's whining without end, and because the whiners are willingly blind to why they are being discounted, there's no rational way to respond to it and I won't try further.

But since I had to waste 8 minutes of my time watching Ben Stein appeal to ignorance, I had to dredge up this little ditty as a chaser.  I guess it's technically in agreement with Stein, but it's a lot more fun and I hope it cheers up others as well.

(is 3fingerspointback)

I was just reading that Kurt Godel believed in the transmigration of souls.  

Maybe the Intelligent Design people should advocate for the teaching of the incompleteness theorem.