The Southern Baptist TEXAN’s Jerry Pierce interviewed Logan Craft, one of the executive producers of the upcoming movie documentary “Expelled,” starring Ben Stein, which will debut in theaters in April.

Craft, a University of Texas at Austin alumnus now living in Santa Fe, N.M., is chairman of Premise Media. “Expelled” exposes the blacklisting of academics who question the prevailing Darwinian dogma. It includes interviews with William Dembski, a leading intelligent design thinker and a research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, and Robert Marks, a distinguished professor of engineering at Baylor University in Waco. The following is transcribed from a phone interview with Craft.

TEXAN: How did Premise Media get involved in this project?

CRAFT: There are three partners, executive producers, of Premise—Walt Ruloff, John Sullivan and myself. I’m the chairman, Walt Ruloff is the CEO and John is the president. And we have an extensive team that works directly for the company and then is contracted also by the company on the film “Expelled.”

The original inspiration came specifically in this subject matter to Walt Ruloff, who is a Canadian. He lives in Vancouver. I used to live in Vancouver, where I studied under a theologian named J.I. Packer at Regent, and Walt and I became acquainted. Walt was a very successful technology entrepreneur, founder of a software company. And he was doing some business in Houston and he picked up a ‘Wired” magazine in the Houston Intercontinental Airport lounge and he read an article about this debate between evolution and intelligent design. He had always been interested in the subject matter and he got inspired and kind of had an epiphany on the flight back to Canada, and he wrote out a treatment on a screenplay. And that very beginning, a sort of inspirational moment for Walt, turned into a partnership between John, Walt and myself to explore controversial subject matter related to science and to science and religion.

I had been working in New Mexico. I produced and hosted a regionally televised program called “Church and State with Logan Craft.” And “Church and State” explored a lot of the controversial social issues and political issues that both religious and non-religious people were interested in. So when Walt and John brought this to me, I was interested because I had been covering a panoply of issues over the years and was very, very aware of the connection between the landmark issues in the culture war and the debate over evolution. So we formed a partnership in 2005, developed the company in 2006 and began filming and acquiring raw material footage in the middle of 2006.

TEXAN: How did Ben Stein come to be involved in the film?

CRAFT: Well, John had a real insight, we believe, into the necessity to have a person, first of all, who wasn’t overtly Christian or overtly religious and also someone who had a comic element to their personality or their repertoire, but also an intellectual. Well, that kind of limits the field. There aren’t that many of those folks out there.

Once Ben became acquainted with what we were doing, he got excited because he began to see a connection between our exploration and sanctity of life issues. He’s a very, very strong pro-life advocate. He has a high view of human dignity and human sanctity. And he saw a connection between what we were exploring, and sanctity of life issues and the historical elements of the eugenics movement, and especially as a Jewish person, the eugenics movement as it morphed into the Nazi racial cleansing laws.

TEXAN: How do you answer those who charge that ID is simply a Trojan horse for getting six-day biblical creationism taught in public schools?

CRAFT: That’s fanciful to the point of comedy. Understand that although all the producers are Christians and we have, let’s say, complementary views about most moral issues, I can’t say we came to this project with any uniform view or underlying agenda.

TEXAN: Why do you think intelligent design is such a lightning-rod issue with the academic establishment?

CRAFT: ID is a threat to the Darwinian establishment because ID really is a scientific rather than theological discipline. Intelligent design as a scientific arena of exploration, inquiry and research—it doesn’t reference any divine test. It doesn’t even reference any natural philosophy that tries the explain God, per se. The public—wherever they are on the spectrum of how things started and developed, whether it was in six days and the world is 10,000 years old or whether it was a longer process—the number of people who actually understand and then buy into the Darwinian theory is very small.

The reason ID is a lightning rod is because ID threatens that foundational mechanism of Darwinism. It threatens the mechanics of random mutation and it threatens what we maintain is a metaphysical position of Darwinism, not a scientific position that it is an undesigned, random process.  Intelligent design says, look, there is design in these structures in nature and the intelligence that we know more and more and more about every week now related to what is driving the structures, that’s designed. It’s obviously designed. It’s extremely plausible that this is a designed structure. Intelligent design doesn’t even address within the scientific inquiry the existence of a Designer, capital D, it’s merely trying to say, “Look, when we come to studying phenomena in nature, we have basically been given a template where we must not study phenomena with any sort of design presuppositions.”

We are saying that’s becoming more and more untenable based on what we see in the DNA, the operations of the cell, the intelligence of the cell, the code that’s driving structures and driving changes—this has got to be designed. Let’s look at it from a design perspective. Random mutation may have made sense to Darwin 150 years ago, but that’s because he thought the cell was protoplasm. He didn’t know about the unbelievable intricacy and complexity of the cell and the machines working in the cell and the duplication and replication and regeneration going on in the cell. He didn’t know about that. How is that code and that intelligence going to mutate along the lines of a Darwinian framework?

It’s becoming more and more implausible. Science has become captive to an overarching philosophy of scientific materialism, and we believe science became captive to that predominantly through the propagation of the theory of Darwinism, especially the theory of Darwinism resting on its mechanics, which is random mutation, chance, and purposelessness in the complexity of the development of life forms.  

Intelligent design, you see, goes right for the jugular and challenges that assumption, which then shakes the foundation which science has become captive to. If there is design in nature, it does beg the metaphysical question, does it not? If it’s design, is it nature itself doing this, or is there a designer? That’s what the Darwinists who are committed atheists do not like. They hate that.

TEXAN: I understand that William Dembski, formerly at Baylor, is in this film, as well as Robert Marks of Baylor. What was your reaction when you discovered the resistance to intelligent design research at places like Baylor or SMU?

CRAFT: That’s no surprise. To me, the long history of religiously founded universities and colleges in the United States is typically one of the ultimate capturing of the colleges and universities by the progressive secularists. I think you see that at Baylor partly. You see that at SMU almost entirely.

The state universities and colleges are a different animal. What we see here is a struggle for a religiously founded university to maintain