Both PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins have been scammed into giv­ing inter­views for a cre­ation­ist pro­pa­ganda movie. When they were approached, the movie was appar­ently titled Cross­roads, and had the fol­low­ing synopsis

It’s been the cent­ral ques­tion of human­ity through­out the ages: How in the world did we get here? In 1859 Charles Dar­win provided the answer in his land­mark book, “The Ori­gin of Spe­cies.” In the cen­tury and a half since, bio­lo­gists, geo­lo­gists, phys­i­cists, astro­nomers and philo­soph­ers have con­trib­uted a vast amount of research and data in sup­port of Darwin’s idea. And yet, mil­lions of Chris­ti­ans, Muslims, Jews and other people of faith believe in a lit­eral inter­pret­a­tion that humans were craf­ted by the hand of God. This con­flict between sci­ence and reli­gion has unleashed pas­sions in school board meet­ings, courtrooms and town halls across Amer­ica and beyond.

Now that the movie is ready for release we dis­cover that it’s actu­ally titled Expelled: No Intel­li­gence Allowed and that it’s the usual reli­gious attack on sci­ence, com­bined with the now famil­iar claim that the only reason any­one believes in “Dar­win­ism” is that there’s some secret police force root­ing out the dis­sent­ers and ruin­ing their careers before they can speak out:

Unlike some other doc­u­ment­ary films, Expelled doesn’t just talk to people rep­res­ent­ing one side of the story. The film con­fronts sci­ent­ists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delu­sion, influ­en­tial bio­lo­gist and athe­ist blog­ger PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott, head of the National Cen­ter for Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion. The cre­at­ors of Expelled crossed the globe over a two-​​year period, inter­view­ing scores of sci­ent­ists, doc­tors, philo­soph­ers and pub­lic lead­ers. The res­ult is a start­ling rev­el­a­tion that free­dom of thought and free­dom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-​​funded high schools, uni­ver­sit­ies and research institutions.

What’s the bet­ting that their claim to not just rep­res­ent one side of the story isn’t entirely accur­ate? The way they got inter­views with at least two of their enemies doesn’t exactly demon­strate a com­mit­ment to the truth.

PZ expresses sur­prise that they felt the need to lie to him to get the inter­view; after all, he’s not exactly known for being shy about arguing with the faith­ful. I’m temp­ted to sug­gest that the cre­ation­ists, and espe­cially their well oiled PR machine, have got so used to lying whenever sci­ence is so much as men­tioned, that they just for­got there was any other way to com­mu­nic­ate. Actu­ally, though, I sus­pect they had good reas­ons to lie. PZ might have been will­ing to show up if he’d known the real reason for the inter­view, but he’d also have been much less will­ing to be led in the inter­view, much more on his guard and much less likely to acci­dent­ally say some­thing that could be used to make him look bad. But quite aside from that, I just don’t think PZ was their main event. It’s no insult to the man — reg­u­lar read­ers will know I have noth­ing but respect for him — but to the cre­ation­ists he’s a bonus item; they were after Dawkins, who’s well known for not debat­ing, or giv­ing inter­views to creationists.

It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what the movie’s like; I doubt it’ll get a cinema release in the UK, but I’m sure I’ll man­age to track it down some­how. I don’t hold out any hope that any of the sci­ent­ists’ inter­views will have been used com­plete, and the under­hand method they used to to get them doesn’t allow me to believe that even the spirit of what they said will be left intact, but it might at least be good com­edy to see just how ter­ribly their words have been twisted.