Richard Land interviews Ben Stein - Part 2

Part 2 of Richard’s interview with Ben Stein is now online.

(Originally broadcast on the FaithandFamily.com radio broadcast.)

“I could be wrong, I’m often wrong, but it seems to me we’ve just been fed a lot of horse poopy…” - Ben Stein

Transcript after the break or in PDF (178 KB)

• Baptist Press reports on this interview.

TRANSCRIPT – Day 2

Dr. Richard Land interviews Ben Stein

Original air date: April 18, 2008

This is a rush transcript. It is not in its final form and may be changed.

LAND: This is Richard Land and we want to welcome you back to our program today. We have Ben Stein with us again today and, Ben, you have just finished this wonderful movie, “Expelled,” which really takes on the scientific establishment. Welcome back.

STEIN: Well, it is a pleasure to be here.

LAND: Now, I know some of our people will want to know more about you.

STEIN: Oh, let’s talk about that.

LAND: Tell us about, because, I mean, you know, you’ve got an interesting background. I mean, first of all, you are not the kind of person that some people would expect to be taking this subject on. You graduated from Columbia University, you graduated as valedictorian from Yale Law School in 1970.

STEIN: I want to be honest about this here, Richard. I was elected by my classmates to be valedictorian. I did not have the highest grades in the class by a long shot, but I was elected to be valedictorian.

LAND: Well, in any event, you were valedictorian, and you were a poverty lawyer in New Haven and in Washington, D.C., and you were involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

STEIN: Very much so, yes.

LAND: As an activist. And then you became a speech writer for Richard Nixon.

STEIN: Well, Nixon was a big Civil Rights…

LAND: That’s interesting.

STEIN: Nixon was a very interesting guy in this area because he saw what George Wallace had been able to do. He was absolutely bowled over by what George Wallace was able to do.

LAND: Let me remind some of our younger listeners, what Wallace was able to do was get, what was it, 10 million votes in 1968 as an independent candidate.

STEIN: I think actually, if I may say so, he might have gotten 11 or 12 million. Wallace was the Governor of Alabama and he had been quite a moderate guy, but he saw that the political winds were blowing toward extreme resistance to integration. He became an arch segregationist, an arch racist, and he brought that message to Alabama with overwhelmingly good results for him, electorally, and obviously it was a morally bad message. They then took it all across the country and he was winning states that nobody would have dreamed of: Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan. He didn’t win Michigan, he almost won Michigan. He won Maryland. Maryland! He was just rolling up victory after victory.

LAND: I tell people this. You know, if George Wallace could get that many votes in 1968 in America, it is easy to understand how Hitler got a third of the vote in 1932 in the middle of a depression.

STEIN: Well, let’s be fair here, if we may. It is hard for me to do, I’m sure it isn’t hard for you to do. Wallace wasn’t Hitler, I mean, once he left the deep south, when he was talking in Maryland or Wisconsin or Michigan, he was talking about states rights, etc., but everybody knew that was code for cracking down on the black people. He did so well it was unbelievable. By the way, I would just like to just tell you, just between us girls, I think if another George Wallace came along with a similar message, he could get a lot of traction today, too, because I think there is still a lot of racial anger simmering just below the surface in this country. Not anything like there was, but a lot still.

LAND: Well, I hope you’re wrong.

STEIN: Well, I hope I’m wrong too. I’ve got to interrupt us to say this. We are talking from Nashville, a beautiful, wonderful city. Last night we went with some people from the government of this beautiful state of Tennessee to the Nashville Public Library, a beautiful, beautiful building. They are having an exhibit of photos of the Civil Rights demonstrations in Nashville in the early ’60s. Poor black people getting their brains beat in for trying to get a hamburger at a diner. Poor black people getting their heads beat in for trying to get service at a lunch counter at some dumpy restaurant. Then, we go across the street and have dinner at Morton’s, which is probably the most expensive restaurant in Nashville, certainly one of them. And, who is there but largely black people who are largely big officials and powerful officials in the State of Tennessee, and they are there laughing and joking and with white people, and they are all getting along great together. Much better than they would get along in Beverly Hills, and I’m thinking to myself, my gosh, it has only been forty-four years since those pictures were taken and look at the change in Tennessee. What a testament to man’s achievement and what a testament to the fact that Darwin was totally wrong. There are no superior or inferior races, that, in fact, if you give people a chance, educate them, open the doors for them, expect more of them, give them high expectations instead of low expectations, they can do anything. I thought to myself, Darwin would be stupefied by what he saw, but, if I may say so, Jesus would be very, very happy.

LAND: He would, and, of course, I used the example you’ve just vividly described to explain that, people say, you can’t legislate morality. Laws make a difference.

STEIN: They make a huge difference.

LAND: The south in 1970, the south was the most segregated region of the country in enrollment and housing patterns. As you know, the Civil Rights Laws applied to the thirteen states that had systemic patterns of discrimination in ways they didn’t apply to the other thirty-seven states. As a result of those Civil Rights Laws, by 1990, the south had gone from being the most segregated part of the country to being the most integrated part of the country in terms of its housing patterns and in terms of its enrollment patterns. I would argue that the Civil Rights revolution has been a bigger success in the south than anywhere else.

STEIN: There’s no question you are right, Richard. You know, Martin Luther King, Jr., the greatest man of my era, said morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated. And this behavior has been regulated. He said, the law cannot teach a man to love me, morality and religion and education have to do that, but the law can stop him from lynching me. I think that is something and that is exactly what the law has done and that is incredibly unbelievably important.

LAND: It is, it is. Okay, so, Ben Stein goes to work at the White House for Richard Nixon. How do you go from being, I know Nixon was a progressive on civil rights.

STEIN: He was fairly progressive.

LAND: He filed the first….

STEIN: To be candid, he pretended that he was very sympathetic to the states rights people and he had the southern strategy which was he was going to scoop up all the white voters who had been alienated by the Civil Rights Act of Lyndon Johnson and he did scoop them up. But, in fact, once he got into office he was very aggressive at liquidating the last hold outs of school segregation.

LAND: And also filed the first desegregation suit outside the south.

STEIN: Oh, I didn’t know that.

LAND: The Mitchell Justice Department filed the first desegregation suit outside the south.

STEIN: Where was that?

LAND: I believe it was in Michigan.

STEIN: You know, as you say it, I’m getting a vague recollection of it. That’s right.

LAND: It caused all kinds of uproar.

STEIN: Yes, and, by the way, as we were saying a few minutes ago, and Wallace won Michigan. And I think, by the way, if Wallace hadn’t been shot in 1972, I think it would have been a huge factor in the election. Huge, huge.

LAND: You know, if you go to Alabama, I digress here, but if you go to Alabama today, I didn’t live in the deep south in the sixties, I was in Texas which was different, but I am told there wasn’t much difference between Alabama and Mississippi.

STEIN: I don’t think there was.

LAND: Today, it is like two different worlds.

STEIN: Alabama is amazing. Go to downtown Birmingham, it’s thoroughly integrated.

LAND: And the difference is Wallace because Wallace apologized and said he was wrong and no one in Mississippi in the establishment has ever said that.

STEIN: But Mississippi has changed too, Richard. I mean…

LAND: It has changed but it is light years behind Alabama.

STEIN: But it is catching up. They are all catching up. The whole glory of the Human Rights revolution in America is yet to be revealed, but it is marching right along. It is so glorious to see it. It is so glorious. I grew up, see, we’ve established now that I’m two years older than you, so I am the old guy here. I grew up in Maryland which was no where near as segregated a state as either of those states, its not even close, but even so, our schools are segregated and it was nauseating to think of the names that our teachers and my fellow students called black people. Just to think of what they called them, which just made me sick and now, we have so much equality of opportunity, its just a miracle.

LAND: You’re right. You know, Wallace, of course this is a particular tragedy because he ran as a racial moderate the first time and he got beat, and so then, I’ll never get…I won’t say what he said…

STEIN: I know what he said.

LAND: But he said he would never get out segregated again, and it was scary. I mean, it was frightening how much popular support he did have.

STEIN: It was amazing and, as I say, had he not been shot, I think amazing things would have happened, it would have turned the country upside down. I don’t approve of people being shot, but it was probably better that he be taken out. I think in terms of his moderating in his old age and after he had been shot, he was a huge factor in racial reconciliation in Alabama. Huge. And I think in his later years, became a genuinely great man.

LAND: And he got more black votes than his opponent did the last time he ran for governor.

STEIN: I think in his later years, he was a genuinely great man.

LAND: Now, Ben, I am guessing that what has happened in your life is that you, from a period of being more liberal when you were in college and in law school, you have moderated some.

STEIN: Well, its not so much that because, no, it probably is that. You’re probably right, it is that. But I think, I was always a believer in God, though. There has never been a time in my life when I haven’t been a believer in God. Now, it is hard for a Jew to be a believer in God because when you see what happened to the Jewish people over the course of history, you have to say, how could a loving God have allowed that. But I have always believed in God and I have always believed in a caring, loving God. And, you know, this is sort of what I find so amazing about the Darwinist, another reason why I wanted to work on the movie, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is I just don’t understand how people can believe they are in charge of the world. They are in charge of what happens to them. When each one of us in this room, there are just a few of us in this room right now because we’re doing a radio show, but, each one of us in this room looks back over his or her life and says, how much of it did I plan, how much of it did I control, and how much of it just happened to me by the grace of a loving God? Look, you said we were born on the third base and thought we hit a triple. Every American has had that happen to them. How can you explain that except by the grace of a loving God? How can you explain that? How can you explain the fact that we have penicillin and air conditioning and Novocain when we go to the dentist? How can you explain that except that there is a loving God.

LAND: Well, I agree. You can understand the appeal, I mean, if you go back to the garden, this was the appeal in the garden.

STEIN: I totally understand, that ye shall be as gods. What part of the Bible is that from?

LAND: Genesis 1, actually Genesis 3, the devil comes to Eve and says, God is lying to you. God is telling you that if you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you will be like God, and God doesn’t want anybody to be like him. When my oldest daughter was five years old, we were driving through Alabama actually, on our way to Tennessee to visit my mother-in-law and my wife’s family. And we were singing every song we knew and trying to keep order in the car. Singing, “the king is coming, the king is coming,” and so my little girl says, “What’s a king?” So my wife said, “Honey, a king is somebody who tells you what to do,” and my five year old, my sweet little five year old say, “I don’t want anybody to tell me what to do.” I said, “there it is.” There’s the sin nature, alive in this little five year old girl. I don’t want anybody to tell me what to do. I mean, that is the human condition.

STEIN: Yes, and there is a deep wish in humans to not be responsible for their actions. I think that is more appropriate. We interviewed a very smart psychiatrist, named Dr. Schwartz, who said the whole basis of this appeal to Darwinism is if you believe in Darwinism you believe you are not responsible and if there is no body holding you responsible, there is no punishment, you can do anything you want, and a lot of people want to do anything they want. I don’t want…maybe its because I’m old now…I don’t want to do anything I want. Or I should say, I want to do a lot less than I used to want to do, but I’d like to have it be not wrong. That’s what I’d like to do.

LAND: I want to know the truth, and I want to live my life according to the truth. If that truth makes certain demands on me, I still want to know what the truth is, because…

STEIN: We all want to know the truth.

LAND: So, Ben, what shocked you the most in the making of this movie?

STEIN: I think what shocked me the most was the incredible arrogance of the Darwinists even when confronted with the obvious gigantic holes, flaws, and lacunae in their theory. That even when confronted with the fact that this is, to put it mildly, a highly incomplete theory, they were just as arrogant as ever. And they simply didn’t want to hear the truth. They didn’t want to hear any facts that contradicted their points of view. They just wanted to go on merrily being in charge.

LAND: And they are not used to being contradicted.

STEIN: No, no. When I talked to Dr. Dawkins he was quite startled that I didn’t just get on my hands and knees and say how great he was. At least I think he was, I can’t read his mind.

LAND: Well, he certainly gives every appearance of being impregnably arrogant.

STEIN: Well, he is pretty arrogant, just as a view point, I could be wrong.

LAND: At one point, the most shocking and also the most humorous thing that is in this film is your final interview with Richard Dawkins where he is reduced, rather than have an intelligent designer who might be God, he comes up with aliens from another universe. Tell us about that.

STEIN: Well, I said to him, this is a law school tactic I used, I said, now, Dr. Dawkins, do you think there is no chance at all, I’m paraphrasing, there is no chance at all that there is an intelligence that designed the earth? No, I wouldn’t say no chance at all. I said, well, what would you say the percentage is, one percent? He said, it might be one percent. I said, could it be three percent? He said, yes, it could be three percent. I said, could it be forty-nine percent? He said, no, it couldn’t be that. And I said, well, how do you know, it is three percent and not forty-nine percent? So anyway, we went on from there and I said, well if there is one percent or three percent chance, how did it happen? He said, well it could have been people from outer space of superior intelligence came and seeded the earth. And I said, where’d they come from? He couldn’t answer that one. He got kind of annoyed at me. I think by the end of the process he was a little bit annoyed at me altogether, although I must say, he kept his cool and I actually invited him to dinner after the interview and he had to go back to his hometown. I forgot whether it was Oxford or Cambridge, I think it was Oxford.

LAND: Oxford. I’m an Oxford graduate and it pains me to have to say this to you, but, yes, he is a professor at Oxford.

STEIN: Well, he’s a very famous and very successful and rich, rich professor. His books sell like crazy.

LAND: They do, but I think sometimes people get a false impression from that because, you know, you’ve got Dawkins,’ The God Delusion, and you’ve got Harris’ book and you’ve got Christopher Hitchens’ book, but if you take those books and their total sales, and you stack them up against the sales of religious literature in the United States, it becomes tiny, tiny. They’ve got much less competition in their market share.

STEIN: Well, it’s interesting. If you read those books too, especially Dawkins’ book, they are pretty thin gruel, I mean there is not that is not that much there. I mean, at one point, he quotes George Carlin, a comedian. I said to him, I don’t think this actually made it into the film, I said why are you in a scientific book quoting George Carlin, a comedian? And he said something like, well, why not? Well, that’s not much of an answer.

LAND: No, its not. When I first started investigating the intelligent design movement for myself, what I found intriguing was, most of the people who are the driving force behind it, are not people who are theologians, they are not people who are philosophers, they are young turk scientists, who have been uncowed by the scientific establishment and who are driven to this position by their research in the laboratory. I mean, you read, Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, and he was taught theistic evolution at the Catholic schools he attended, and so he was at least a theistic evolutionist, and he was driven to intelligent design by what he calls the irreducible complexity of this one little single cell organism that he was studying.

STEIN: Right, and I can easily see why he was driven to that, but see, I don’t think you even need to go there, as I’ve said to you before. I don’t think you need to go to is a cell irreducibly complex, is some portion of a cell irreducibly complex, is this or that life form irreducibly complex. Just ask one of these materialistic evolutionists where did gravity come from? Where did thermodynamics come from? Where did these laws and governing principles that govern the operation of life come from? I have a doctor, a very close friend, who is also my doctor, who is a brilliant, brilliant man of science, and he says if you’d get into the question of governing principles with these men, and women of course, they just can’t go anywhere. They have no traction what so ever. None, zero. They are just on slippery ground.

LAND: If you look at the people who are challenging the scientists who are challenging, they are disproportionately in certain fields. They are in biochemistry, they are in physics, and they are in mathematics.

STEIN: Astronomy too.

LAND: Astronomy and mathematics. You know, Dembski, basically he says that you feed this material into a computer and it says probability nil. It just can’t have happened.

STEIN: It can’t have happened, even over four and a half billion years, can’t have happened. I think, I could be wrong, I want to emphasize, I could be wrong, I’m often wrong, but it seems to me we’ve just been fed a lot of horse poopy and we are being told that we should accept it as scientific bedrock fact. People like Dawkins will say, well you can no more question, I think he said this, it might have been one of his friends, you can no more question Darwinism than you can question gravity. Well, we can see the results of gravity, just throw a ball up in the air and it comes down and hits the ground. But can you see a species evolve? Can you see a life begin by lightening striking a mud puddle? No. Absolutely not. Now, it is not empirically proved and it is not intuitively obvious at all.

LAND: Well, if I remember the scientific method, there is something about, you have to have replicable processes. You can’t replicate creation.

STEIN: No. You can’t replicate creation and they can’t replicate evolution of separate species. So they have nothing.

LAND: That’s right.

STEIN: On the other hand, they have all the levers of power in the scientific community and I’m sure they are going to make my life miserable.

LAND: Well, they are going to probably try, but I suspect that you will enjoy it.

STEIN: I don’t enjoy it when I get hate mail, I get hate mail saying you’re an idiot, you’re a jerk, I got a man from the Orlando Sentinel who compared me to holocaust denier. As a person who had three cousins killed by Hitler, I didn’t like that very much. I was contemplating whether or not to sue him, but then I thought to myself, law suits are not the answer.

LAND: Okay, Ben Stein. What do you hope will be accomplished by this movie?

STEIN: Opening people’s eyes to the dominance that the Darwinian establishment, Darwinist establishment, has, the power they have in the scientific community, and to their stranglehold on the scientific thought and to their dictatorial ways in which they employ that power, and opening peoples eyes to the flaws in Darwinism, the lack of scientific rigor in basis and extent in Darwinism and getting people to say, hey, we have got to stand up and try to get some new ideas in here and get some truth in here and, at all costs, get some freedom of speech in here.

LAND: How can people find out how they can see this movie, or how they can encourage their theater to have this movie in their theater?

STEIN: Well, they can just call the theater owner or manager or the next time they are at the theater, go and say, can I speak to the manager, he’ll probably be a sixteen-year-old kid by the way, and say, we’ve heard about this great movie called “Expelled,” we’d really love to see it. We might bring our church group or our youth group to see it. And that will help get it in the theaters. Although we are already in a thousand screens, so it is going to be a wide release.

LAND: Is there a web site where people can look?

STEIN: www.expelledthemovie.com, and it’s a very beautiful web site with a great, great trailer. The movie will be everywhere. The main thing is, go to it and tell your friends if you liked it, do a mass e-mail saying, friends, this is a movie I just saw, you’ll love it.

LAND: Well, as you’ve heard me say before our listeners, we all have a circle of influence, and within that circle of influence, you need to exercise you influence to get people to be aware of this movie, to talk to their circle of influence about this movie, and to go see this movie. This is one of these times when you can vote with your pocketbook. You can vote with your economic franchise, and Hollywood will listen when they see the dollar signs.

STEIN: Absolutely, absolutely. And what we want to do is get a studio going, Premise Media, that is going to bring out more and more and more movies to bring up some more truth in various cultural areas like this area and the sanctity of life is one that is also on our radar screen.