Richard Land interviews Ben Stein - Part 1

Part 1 of Richard’s interview with Ben Stein is now online.

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

“Well, it is not just Darwinian… it is Neo-Darwinism, because Darwin himself, he was an open-minded, broad-minded guy. He was a genius. There are no two ways about that.

He got a lot of things wrong and he was a stupendously racist guy, but he was in the category of very, very smart people.

Today’s followers of Darwin, they’re little dictators.” - Ben Stein

Transcript after the break or in PDF (183 KB)

TRANSCRIPT – Day 1

Dr. Richard Land interviews Ben Stein

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

RICHARD LAND: This is Richard Land, I want to welcome you to our program today. We have a very special guest, Ben Stein. Ben, welcome to our program.

BEN STEIN: It is my pleasure, Sir.

LAND: Well, we’ve just finished watching a screening here at Opryland at the National Religious Broadcasters of your new movie, “Expelled.” I want to congratulate you. It is a riveting movie.

STEIN: Well, you’re very kind. I have to take exception to your saying it is my movie. I am one small part of a very wonderful team, lead by Walt Ruloff and John Sullivan, Logan Craft, and many other fine people, but we hope it is pretty good and we hope people pay attention in both positive ways and I am afraid in negative ways too. We expect that.

LAND: Well, first of all, tell us what it’s about. Just give us a brief summary.

STEIN: It is about Darwinism and how Darwinism, which Darwin proposed as a hypothesis, has become a dictatorial totalitarian regime within big science and the Academy of the United States of America, colleges and universities, and foundations, and you cannot question it, you cannot doubt it, you cannot express the slightest quibble with it, or you lose your grant, you lose your job, you lose your office, you lose your friends, sometimes you lose your family. You are expelled, in other words, and we think that is a bad state of affairs in a free society and a society founded on the freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. We think it is a bad situation in a society where we are desperate for answers to scientific questions. We think especially it is intellectually dishonest, because Darwinism does not explain very much. I don’t know where you’re from but I am from Washington, D.C. and if you were to say to a Darwinist, well, how do you get from Washington, D.C. to New York, he might say, well, you take the New Jersey Turnpike. Alright, well, the New Jersey Turnpike takes you a little bit of the way, but there is also the Beltway, there is also route 50, there is also route 95, there is also McHenry Tunnel. There are just a lot of different parts of the road. It is possible that evolutionism explains changes within species. I have no doubt about that, frankly, but does it explain where life came from? No. Does it explain where matter came from? No. Does it explain where energy came from? No. Does it explain how any single mammalian species ever got to be there? No. Does it explain where gravity comes from? No. Physics? No. Thermodynamics? No. Doesn’t explain any of those things, so it is a theory which, at best, it explains a very teeny part of the puzzle.

LAND: Well, that’s exactly right. You know, when ever I’m asked about it, do I believe in evolution, I say, well, what do you mean by evolution. If you mean evolution within species, yes. But if you’re talking about that from nothing came something and it has gotten to where we are now, the Darwinian theory of evolutionary origins, no I don’t believe that and it takes a great deal more faith than I have to believe that.

STEIN: Well, I always say, and I appreciate your saying that, I always am sort of amazed when people say, oh, Darwin is the answer to everything. Well, Darwin didn’t even pretend he had the answer to everything. I mean, if you were interviewing Charles Darwin now, he’d be saying, Sir, Mr. Land, with all due respect, I claimed a little teeny, tiny bit of an explanation. I didn’t explain much more than that and my explanation might be wrong, at that. But his followers have taken it to include all of human life. You know, it’s funny, almost at the same time Darwinism was created, Communism was created, and the founders of Communism said, well, we think this is a theory about how all of human life works, and they were very arrogant about it. Darwin was very modest about his theory, but his followers have become like communists, they’re not communists, but in the sense that they believe their theory explains everything. Communism doesn’t explain much and neither does Darwinism, as far as I can tell. Now, I could be wrong. I want to say that, I could be wrong, I’m wrong about a heck of a lot. I’d like to hear the Darwinists say the same thing, we admit we could be wrong, we are wrong about a heck of a lot, we could be wrong about this too.

LAND: I want to ask you a question that will ask you to speculate. Whenever the scientific establishment, which is Darwinian to the core, whenever the phrase, “intelligent design” or any alternative theory of explanations is even posited, they act like a bunch of old ladies who just saw a white mouse run into the room. They jump up on the chairs and pull their dresses up and scream and yell. What are they afraid of?

STEIN: Well, how about losing their jobs, how about losing their prestige, how about losing the doctrine that got them their jobs and their prestige and their paycheck. How about being found to have been following a false god all of these years. I mean, Darwinism, for a Darwinist who has gotten a prestigious university position or is selling lots of books, is everything, Darwinism is everything. I mean, you might as well say, well, how important is communism to a guy who is a member of the Polit Bureau in the Soviet Union? Very important. So that is what they are scared of.

LAND: But if they are so certain they are right, why not debate it?

STEIN: Because they are not certain they are right.

LAND: That’s right. I mean, it seems to me that underlying this is almost a spirit of insecurity and fear that they know that there are major holes in their supposedly theory.

STEIN: These guys are not idiots, although, it is possible to talk yourself into anything. I mean, I am sure that there are communists in the Polit Bureau who truly believe that Marx, Engels, and Lennon had explained everything about human life, but most of them knew it was just a meal ticket. And I think a lot of the Darwinists know it is just a very nice meal ticket.

LAND: You are a person who has reached a stage of success in life that you can spend your time on the projects that interest you, so how did you first get interested in this?

STEIN: Well, I’m not that advanced in stage, I have to mostly spend my time in projects that pay my wife’s Master Card bill, but I got interested in it because I had always been extremely weary of Darwinism as a social phenomenon because I knew it had lead to social Darwinism and that had led to Nazism and to the Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews, including three of my cousins. So, I was always weary of Darwinism about that. But then, when I met Walt Ruloff and John Sullivan and Dr. Meyer, and started talking to them about the scientific meaning of Darwinism and how incredibly unlikely it was that Darwinism as a scientific theory could hold water, I thought suddenly, wow, the Emperor’s got no clothes; this whole thing is crazy. I mean, what’s going on here? Darwinism doesn’t explain anything about where life started. Darwin didn’t even pretend that it did, so what are you guys talking about, saying you can’t discuss anything about Darwinism? Darwin, himself, would have let you talk about other explanations. So, let’s go out and say to the people, people, we hate to break this to you, but the Emperor has no clothes and let’s try to find him some clothes. If it turns out that intelligent design is correct as to one little part, which is that cell cannot only change through random mutation and natural selection, but also through adaptation, if it turns out there is a software code in the cell that the cell can rewrite in response to different conditions, that gives us a big leg up on curing cancer, or preventing cancer, that is an incredibly important thing to do, rather than just say, Hosannas to Darwin, let’s try to cure cancer.

LAND: We were always taught the scientific method was the pursuit of truth and that no questions were finally answered.

STEIN: Well put, well put.

LAND: And this disconnect that we have, I mean, I went to a public high school in Houston, Texas…

STEIN: I did too.

LAND: …and I was taught Darwinian theory as fact.

STEIN: I think I was too, although I think, you know it’s interesting. How old are you?

LAND: I’m sixty-one.

STEIN: I’m sixty-three. I went to school in Maryland, and I think our teacher said, I could be wrong about this, my mind might be playing tricks on me, my memory might be, I think our teacher said, God created the earth and then after that it started to evolve. But, certainly you could never hear that in a classroom now.

LAND: Well, my biology professor in 1963 in a public high school in Houston, Texas, was an absolutely convinced and arrogant atheist evolutionist.

STEIN: Well, my teacher was Mr. Michaelson and he was a really, really nice guy, and I think he would have an open mind about everything, but anyway, I would love to see, let me pursue this, I think if the ordinary citizen knew that the school boards are trying to ram Darwinism down the kids’ throats, but Darwinism, even if you take every word of Darwin as gospel, doesn’t explain more than a tiny percentage of creation, a tiny percentage, I think that parents would be outraged and say, cut it out, we don’t want you ramming this ridiculous theory down our kids’ throat. I mean, okay, fine, teach it as a theory that explains one percent of what is going on, but please don’t try to tell our kids what is going on when you know it isn’t.

LAND: Well, what fascinates me is virtually, let’s say 85% of the people in America went to public high school, a vast percentage of them were taught Darwinian theory as fact, and yet, 60% of Americans don’t believe it. This is what drives the establishment crazy, because they just don’t believe it.

STEIN: The establishment would love to get America to stop believing in God, because if they could start getting them to stop believing in God, then the powers that be could have total control over the minds of Americans. I mean, in George Orwell’s world, the ultimate crime was thought crime. Not breaking into a store and robbing it, not murdering someone, certainly not raping someone, but thought crime was the mother of all crimes, and what the Darwinists are really saying is if you question Darwinism, you are committing thought crime.

LAND: The phrase in the movie where you say that Dr. Sternberg published this paper by Steven Meyer that said that there might be the possibility that intelligent design might provide an explanation for this irreducible complexity.

STEIN: I’ll tell you about Dr. Sternberg. Dr. Sternberg is a nice, smart, mild mannered guy who has got a beautiful, beautiful wife from somewhere in South America, he is a scientist at the Smithsonian, which is one of the great assets scientifically of the United States of America. He is the editor of a magazine there about biology. He was sent a paper by Dr. Steven Meyer, who is an incredibly smart biologist, just an incredibly smart guy, and it was about the possibility of intelligent design—just the possibility, and he thought it was a good paper, Dr. Sternberg thought it was a good paper. He circulated it to a number of scientists, they said it is a pretty good paper, and let’s publish it. So, in other words, it was peer reviewed, which is the gold standard for academic papers. They published it. All kinds of people yelled and screamed, they criticized him, they took away his office, they put him in a back room of a cubby hole somewhere, and he said, but wait a minute, this was peer reviewed, what are you yelling at me for? They said, oh, you’re an intellectual terrorist. So, this happened to this guy and his life was pretty much torn to pieces. A very brave United States congressman named Congressman Souder did an investigation of it, found that there was a conspiracy to get this guy within the Smithsonian, and it is a tragedy. It is just unbelievably bad what happened to this guy, and we talked to him, talked to Dr. Sternberg, we talked to Dr. Meyer. It is just pure intellectual terrorism against them. And it is suppression and that is what our movie is about in large part, academic suppression, and it is very, very upsetting in a free society.

LAND: It is.

STEIN: I’m sorry to give you such a long answer.

LAND: Well, no, it is upsetting, and it is almost Orwellian.

STEIN: It is very much Orwellian, it is not almost Orwellian, it is Orwellian.

LAND: Now, we have a trial in Pennsylvania where a federal judge is going to adjudicate what is science. You’re a lawyer, what do judges and lawyers know about what makes science?

STEIN: In any way, what is a court doing deciding that? What on earth is a court doing deciding that? The scientists and the people in the county in the town who wanted to say what should be taught in the school, they are the ones who should decide. It shouldn’t be up to a court. I mean, is a court going to say, oh, Ben, you are not allowed to say that because that is not politically correct. Essentially, the court now has set up political correctness standards and that is outrageous, and this is a very, very dangerous portent of what is to come for believers because it is not going to be long before these same people try to shut down private schools, shut down home schooling, that is all coming down the track.

LAND: Well, that’s exactly right. In fact, I just read the other day that a court in California has said that if parents want to home school, the parents have to be certified as teachers.

STEIN: I know.

LAND: Which is absolutely insane.

STEIN: And it totally destroys the whole basis of home schooling.

LAND: And I’m hopeful it is going to be appealed and they will lose at the Supreme Court level.

STEIN: But why is it in court at all? It is a way of trying to take freedoms away from people. See, we have a constant push in human life, and pull. There are some people who want more freedom and trust people to do alright with freedom. We have Thomas Jefferson, Madison, Adams, George Washington, in that category, and then we have people like Stalin, Hitler, Lennon, Marx in the other category who want to take away freedom. I am sorry to say that we have a lot of people in the category of those who want to take away freedom in this great country.

LAND: This is Richard Land and you are listening to our program today, we are interviewing Ben Stein, who has just come out with a new movie called, “Expelled,” that shows the closed mindedness and actually the intellectual terror tactics of the scientific establishment against anyone who challenges the reigning theory that they want to present as fact called, “Darwinian Evolution.”

STEIN: Well, it is not just Darwinian, Richard, it is Neo-Darwinism, because Darwin himself, as I’ve said now a couple of times, he was an open-minded, broad-minded guy. He was a genius. There are no two ways about that. He got a lot of things wrong and he was a stupendously racist guy, but he was in the category of very, very smart people. Today’s followers of Darwin, they are little dictators.

LAND: Well, isn’t that the way? Freudians go way beyond Sigmund Freud, Marxists went beyond Marx, Darwinians go beyond Darwin.

STEIN: But Marx, himself, was a really bad guy who had no problem with the idea of killing people, right and left. Darwin, I think, was a terrible racist, but I don’t think he would have approved of mass murder. Some of his friends, yes, like H.G. Wells, who was a friend and came along later, but was a friend, and I should say admirer, he believes in mass murder, but Darwin, himself, didn’t, but boy his followers sure did, including one Adolph Hitler.

LAND: People don’t really want to know a lot about the Eugenics Movement, because America was a very big, America and Americans, were a very big proponent of the Eugenics Movement, at state fairs and all kinds of things, and there is no question that national socialism was the most rigorous attempt to apply the theories of social Darwinism to a society that has yet been attempted.

STEIN: Well, yes, very rigorous and also, but they thought they were scientifically up to the minute. I mean, they didn’t think that they were butchers. They thought they were doing mankind a favor. They thought they were going to create the best possible mankind, and that would be a mankind without Jews, without eastern Europeans, without anybody who didn’t really look great, although, of course, plenty of them didn’t look too great, but anyway, they thought they were scientists, and, in fact, when people say to me, oh, but science this, science that, and I always say to them, you know what, the last time I looked, science was telling my cousins to go left into the gas chambers, so that’s where science takes you. Not all science, obviously a lot of science is great and solves terrible problems of health and saves lives and gives us the automobile and gasoline and air conditioning, but when you let science rule over human decency, then you are in real trouble.

LAND: That’s right. If you let the people in the white coats make the decisions about what is right and what is wrong, that is above their pay grade.

STEIN: Way above their pay grade.

LAND: And if you don’t have any governments over what they may and may not do, anything will be tried. They will do anything, if they don’t have any moral or ethical parameters, eventually anything that can be done will be done, and we’ve seen this over and over again in totalitarian societies and in societies that have lost their moral compass. To me, the most chilling moment in “Expelled” was your experience at Hadamar. Talk to us about what Hadamar was and this incredible response you got from your very erudite and well-educated guide who obviously had a demagnetized moral compass.

STEIN: Well put, indeed, Richard. We went to this killing center in a beautiful town on a little river near Frankfurt, and Frankfurt, by the way, is a very cosmopolitan big giant financial center, has very good food and wine, and so forth, but anyway, you go a little ways in there and you come to Hadamar. Picture this town. Used to have a mental hospital there. The Nazis took it over and made it into a killing center where they killed people who where were mentally retarded or who were alcoholics or had trouble keeping their job or had been divorced too many times, or his neighbors had ratted on them and said they were not productive citizens, “useless eaters” as the Fuhrer called them, and the Nazis took those people, took them down a flight of steps, told them they were going to be given a shower and then sent into a hospital, and then gassed them. Doctors and nurses, not fake doctors and nurses playing doctors and nurses, real doctors and nurses made the decisions. They gassed them, squished together like sardines, they gassed them. Then they took some of them and they cut their brains out to examine their brains to see what was going on with their brains to see if that might explain why they were unemployed so much. So, I said to this woman who was our guide there, I said, what would you have to say if you could talk to the people who ran this? What would you say to them right now? And she said, oh, it would not be my place to say anything to them. And I said to her, do you think maybe the people who were running this place were more insane than the people they were working on and killing? And she said, oh no, no, they were just scientists following their scientific doctrine. And I said, well, what was their scientific doctrine, a combination of Malthusianism and Darwinism? And as I recall it, she said, no just Darwinism. That’s terrifying, terrifying.

LAND: Well, you know, when you read the interviews with the Nazi doctors that were in the death camps, I mean, it is really frightening.

STEIN: They don’t even fell bad about it. There is a book called, The Trial of the Germans, which is terrifying. They don’t feel bad about it, they think they were really advancing the cause of knowledge and of mankind.

LAND: It shows you what happens when you create a society in which nothing is always wrong. Anything is possible.

STEIN: Yes.

LAND: During the movie I kept thinking about Aldous Huxley’s famous explanation for why the Darwinian theories gained acceptance in the social sciences before they gained acceptance in the hard sciences, and he said, because if there is no God we can live any way we want to.

STEIN: Exactly. We can do anything we want, there is no retribution, there is no punishment, there is no reward. We might as well do anything we want. I think that is how an awful lot of people do live now and it is a terrible way to live. When I think of the wrongs that have been committed supposedly in the interest of science, but really because people have a lot of hatred and envy and resentment and Darwinism basically says, not Darwinism, but Neo-Darwinism basically says it is fine, and Neo-Darwinism basically says, look, we are just robots controlled by our genes. Our genes are trying to reproduce themselves. We don’t have any free will. There is no such thing as thought, we are just programmed to reproduce our genes, that’s all we are doing and we have no conscience and conscience is a fake construct. Consciousness itself is a false construct. That is terrifying, that’s terrifying.

LAND: Well, it is and it does lead to what happened in national socialism in Germany, what happened in the Soviet Union, what happened in China, what happened in Cambodia.

STEIN: We all forget, by the way, we all forget that China probably killed the most of its own people that any country every has, and we don’t even think about that. All we think about is, how can I get a cheap toaster from China.

LAND: Well, “Expelled” is a wonderful movie. I think it should be required viewing…

STEIN: Well, you are very kind.

LAND: …for anyone who wants to understand what is going on and what is at stake in the debate over worldviews in this society.

End Day 1 Transcript.