Later this spring, a new documentary is scheduled for release that is being heralded by some as “the next The Passion of the Christ.” That documentary stars Ben Stein, and is called Expelled.

While I think the Passion comparison is patently absurd, I do find the project very intriguing (in spite of the fact that I haven’t yet seen a moment of the footage) and suspect it might approach the popularity of something like Fahrenheit 9/11 or Bowling for Columbine—and that’s quite a bit better than a poke in the eye with a sharp firestick, if you know what I mean.

Expelled is a critical look not at the shortcomings of Darwinian theory per se, but at the ways in which the Darwinian scientific establishment is apparently seeking to suppress open dialogue about competing theories. The justification for this suppression is that competing theories are not really “scientific,” so free speech is not the issue. Academic respectability is.

Since my own first career was in science, the whole topic fascinates me—and the more I hear about the film and the more Stein’s dry wit worms its way into my brain, the more I anticipate the film’s release. So when the chance came up to participate in a teleconference interview with Ben Stein, I gladly signed up. (Never mind that I have, in the past, publicly derided such telecons as giddy celebrity worship.)

Of course, “sit in” might be better description of what I did than “participate.” Paul Lauer, head honcho at Motive Entertainment (the outfit that promoted The Passion, among other high-profile projects like Narnia and Rocky Balboa) conducted the interview with Stein and Expelled producer Walt Ruloff. Toward the end, participants got a chance to submit questions via email, but that’s not the kind of interview I usually do…

Lauer did a good job of interviewing Ruloff and Stein, though, and here’s a partial transcript of what transpired.

Paul Lauer: Ben, all of us who have been working on this project are convinced that you were, in fact, the perfect person to take on this project and to play this role. But it’s very different from the stuff you’ve done previous to this. And, you’ve had a very—

Ben Stein: It’s different from some of the stuff I’ve done. I mean, it’s a— First of all, there are no perfect people and I’m certainly not perfect, in any regard, but there are— But it’s not different from my work in the Right to Life movement and it’s not different from my work as a poverty lawyer for poor people in New Haven, Connecticut or in Washington, DC. It’s not different from my civil rights work with Stokely Carmichael, so it’s not that different in the sense that it’s a moral cause—but a moral cause being recorded on celluloid? Yes, that’s different.

PL: So, for you, when this project came across your desk, what was it that attracted you to the project?

BS: Well, first of all, I was beguiled by the amount of evidence that Walt Ruloff and the other people I met—Steven Meyer—put out about the incredible complexity of the cell. Let’s back up a little bit. Darwinism, as I understand it, and maybe I don’t understand it, but Darwinism holds that life began by something like lightning striking at the puddle and inorganic [material] being converted to living matter and from that; after four and a half billion years, came the form of life that we now know. But, very quickly came the organic living cell. Now I had thought the cell was just a mass of Jell-O and so, when I learned that Darwinism had such a preposterous idea about how life began, or how the origins of organic life began, with lightning striking a mud puddle, I was just floored that from that, supposedly came the living cell, which has hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of small, tiny intricate parts that have to work together to maintain, repair, reproduce, adapt the cell. And the idea that lightning striking a mud puddle to create something as complex as the cell, struck me as so far-fetched that it deserved to be questioned. Second, the idea that life could be created at all by lightning striking a mud puddle struck me as very far-fetched. Third, the idea, and this struck me as really, really problematical, the idea that Darwinism was a neutral force and didn’t have any moral implications, struck me as extremely problematical, because we know that Darwinism led, in a pretty much straight line, to Nazism and to the Holocaust—the idea [of] the survival of the fittest, and the extermination of those who are considered inferior races. So, all that struck me as subject matter well worth investigating.

PL: Now, you made some bold claims in those statements, and I want to circle back around to some of those because I’m sure many people out there listening will be potentially scratching their heads and saying: “What?” You know, “How does Darwinism lead to Hitler?” But, we’ll come back to that in a moment. Let me jump over to Walt for a second. Walt, what gave you the impetus to get this project off the ground?

Walt Ruloff: Well, just a very quick background. My background is actually in software and software technology. I was a software kid in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, starting up a software company, and was in eight years [a company] that grew to almost 500 people in the area of logistics optimization. And really the key thing for anything in technology is the ability to question any paradigm, or any process, and that’s how we’re having these obsolescence rates in technology, of less than 6 months; and you can see how quickly we’ve moved forward, in these areas of technology. Now, when I sold that business, I started to get involved in some bio-tech and some genomic research; and immediately, the thing that confronted me was there was a whole host of questions that could not be asked, or else you would not receive funding from the NIH/NSF (which is the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation). This immediately struck me as problematic; but looking into it deeper, it really became very clear that this is not a scientific issue, but a political issue. And, in order for us to move forward in one of the most important areas, which is healthcare, it’s important to allow our scientists, and many, many groups, to ask questions. So, upon that, we did a lot more research and we literally just discovered, many, many, many scientists who would not come out and speak about it, and we just felt that it was very important to get this news out there. And this is very important that we have freedom of speech in this area.

PL: Now, Expelled says many things. Let’s talk about what those things are, and what those things may not be. Is Expelled the movie suggesting that Intelligent Design or Creationism be the only thing that is taught in schools?

BS: Absolutely not! And not only that, we’re not, by any means, certain—at least I’m not—that Intelligent Design is the answer. It’s a subject— the origins of life, and the development and evolution of life—those are such complex subjects that, as Darwin put it, for a human being to try and understand them is like a dog trying to understand physics—although my dog’s pretty smart; she might be able to understand physics. But, anyway, we don’t think that we have all the answers; we don’t think that anyone has all the answers. We just want free speech; and it’s interesting in one of his famous letters, Darwin said, “It’s all so complicated, I just want to have free speech and have people able to talk about what they want to talk about.”

PL: Do you feel that the journey that you went on, and the research that you’ve done, Walt, suggests that there is not free speech right now going on at the university, or the scientific, medical level?

WR: Absolutely. There is very, very limited ability to question the tenets of Darwinian orthodoxy, which are two basic mechanisms. One is Random Mutation, the other is Natural Selection; and in the scientists that we’ve interviewed, it’s becoming very, very clear that there are new mechanisms that need to be understood. Now, the problems with those mechanisms is they have metaphysical implications, and just because something is—

BS: Well, why don’t you explain what you mean by “metaphysical implications”?

WR: Sure. Metaphysical implications—and Ben, help me out here—means that there is a sign that an outside intelligence, or something that relates to a faith or belief system, may be relevant here…

BS: Well, something beyond—

WR: Supernatural.

BS: Well, it’s something beyond; not necessarily supernatural, but beyond what is physically apparent.

WR: Exactly. So, just because something has metaphysical implications, what we found was those questions were not allowed to be discussed. Now, it’s very important in science, that you’re able to ask all questions, because science is really based on something called “across the board collaborations,” so as soon as you shut one area down, this has a massive trickle effect and it becomes very problematic to move forward in understanding these mechanisms.

PL: Now, statistically, there are many, many, many Americans who are what would be called Creationists, which means they believe that God created the Earth, that God created the Universe, that God created Man or human beings in our present form. There are others who believe in the Darwinian approach of Random Mutation and Natural Selection. There are many who are somewhere in between, who might be believers in God, but might also believe that there could have been a process of evolution. What does Expelled say about all of those different categories?

BS: Well, I would say, we find Darwinism lacking a great many answers. We suggest the possibility that there’s another theory that might answer some of those questions that are left unanswered by Darwinism. But we welcome all sensible, rational, reasonable, non-belligerent, and explanatory thoughts and theories.

WR: Yeah, just to expand on that: we really are not validating one particular position, be it Intelligent Design or the Design Hypothesis or Creationism or other forms. What we’re really asking for is freedom of speech, and allowing science, and students—people in applied or theoretical research—to have the freedom to go where they need to go,

and ask the questions.

PL: And, despite the hate mail that you’ve received Ben, what is gonna keep you going on this campaign?

BS: Well, Walt won’t let me stop.

WR: Come on, Ben. No—

BS: No, I think you could say I’m gonna keep going on it because I think we’re missing something extremely basic in our understanding of the world, and how it got created and I’d like us to return to that. And, I think, by returning to those bigger subjects of how the world got created and what our place in the world is, we will find a new moral fence which is very much lacking. I mean this country is a country which is a terribly rich country, despite what may be a recession. We’re a terribly rich country, we’re a very technologically advanced country, but we’re a country that’s lost its way morally and we may be able to make a tiny little contribution towards helping it finding it’s way back morally, improving the lives of people as they have a bigger morality. Bigger and clearer and more sure moral compass in their lives.

Thanks to Motive Entertainment for providing the basic transcript. Hollywood Jesus will be publishing the full transcript serially, and the telecon is available from Gotham Conference in podcast form. Expelled is scheduled to release in April.