Win Ben Stein's credibility

Ben Stein is a deeply disingenuous man, which is a polite way to say that for anyone to trust his credibility on any political or economic subject is to simply ignore his past habit of slaying strawmen and twisting facts to suit his thesis.

The growing furor over the movie, visible in blogs, on Web sites and in conversations among scientists, is the latest episode in the long-running conflict between science and advocates of intelligent design, who assert that the theory of evolution has obvious scientific flaws and that students should learn that intelligent design, a creationist idea, is an alternative approach.

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. And while individual scientists may embrace religious faith, the scientific enterprise looks to nature to answer questions about nature. As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are “not within the scope or abilities of science.”

Mr. Stein, a freelance columnist who writes Everybody’s Business for The New York Times, conducts the film’s on-camera interviews. The interviews were lined up for him by others, and he denied misleading anyone. “I don’t remember a single person asking me what the movie was about,” he said in a telephone interview.

Um, that's because they'd already been told the premise of the film -- supposedly, the intersection between science and religion -- which turned out to be a false front for creationism.