It all started with PZ Myers getting ejected from a screening of the movie in Minnesota last month. A famous blogger, Myers is featured heavily in the film but was denied entry to the movie, no explanation given. A gruff security guard told him (or so he says) to leave the premises or face arrest. Myers claims he left, and yet he somehow found time to blog during the movie about how Richard Dawkins managed to gain access to the theater. Where does he claim he did this blogging from, a nearby coffee shop with free Wi-Fi? A likely story.

Fast forward to last night, when our suspicions were confirmed. On the way into the screening, my bag was searched and a security guard frisked me with one of those squealy wands they use to find weapons on people at airports. Now I don't remember the last time someone hijacked a movie theater, so what are they hiding in there?

In we went to find out, and we weren't disappointed. Throughout the movie the intrepid Ben Stein (the movie's hero and narrator) keeps reappearing at a lectern, looking like George W. Bush, talking about 'freedom' this and 'freedom' that. An audience sits rapt before him, reminiscent of the Whitehouse press corps. Clearly, this is a thinly veiled attempt to equate Ben Stein's credibility on science issues with those of W himself. As if to drive home the point, snippets of Ronald Reagan's speeches are spliced in as well, again yammering on about 'freedom.'

Other points only serve to harden the case for conspiracy. Consider:

Fact: when someone asked during the Q&A session "So who did finance this movie?" Premise Media's marketing director, George Lange responded, "I don't know...certainly not George Soros." Oh really? Why was Soros, a famously liberal billionaire on the tip of Lange's tongue?

Fact: Richard Dawkins is known for calling anyone who doesn't agree with him "ignorant" or "stupid." But he even stated in his own review of the movie that he must've been feeling 'magnanimous' that day when he appeared to come out in favor of Intelligent Design. He claims the movie's producers twisted his words, and that he was just describing the idea of panspermia, but come ON. Richard Dawkins is nothing if not not magnanimous.

Fact: When pushed on the PZ Myers fiasco, Lange admitted "Myers earned his money on that one," referring to the publicity that followed. "Earned his money"? what's that supposed to mean, Lange? When pushed that it may have been in the producer's best interest to stage Myers' expulsion, Lange replied "this is not some grand conspiracy." Isn't it? Isn't it?

Lange also said "there was no deception, no one was deceived" in getting several ardent atheists to agree to do their interviews. If that's the case, they'd never agree to appear on film unless they were working from the inside. Here I refer you back to Lange's comment: "Myers earned his money on that one."

The evidence is in and we think you'll agree; it's conclusive. The makers of Expelled are engaged in a massive conspiracy to bring down Intelligent Design movement by pretending to advocate for it.

(The image above comes from William Shatner's reality TV show Invasion Iowa, which staged an "alien wedding" in an Iowa church.)

It's interesting that the current flavor of the month in science fiction TV is Battlestar Galactica, which is all about a clash between two religions rather than religion vs. atheism or humanism.

I haven't read any written science fiction in ages that shows a super-scientific culture squaring off with a super-religious one... except maybe Iain Banks' "Culture" novels, where the scientific, humanistic Culture often squares off against a more religious and traditional civilization. Also, many TV shows — especially Doctor Who — frequently feature religious cultures that have created a kind of "cargo cult" around a piece of half-forgotten technology, and in the case of Doctor Who's "Meglos," the hyper-religious Deions (cute name) are opposed by the hyper-scientific Savants.

The tricky part of creating a future history of religion coming into conflict with science is not stereotyping either side. Especially if you happen to be an atheist or opposed to organized religion yourself. The best handling of religion I've seen in a science fiction book was in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow — where the Jesuits were intimately involved with space exploration, so there was no conflict.

So here are some ideas — I hesitate to call them rules — for creating a future narrative of science clashing with religion:

Find the flashpoint. What's the specific issue that causes tensions to rise between the scientific and religious worldviews? It could be the rise of a more dogmatic strain of fundamentalism, similar to the rise of the Religious Right in the U.S. of the 1980s and early 1990s. But it's probably likely to be some new scientific advance, instead. Something like stem cell research, but more inflammatory. Raising people from the dead, without Jesus? A new kind of nonpolluting car engine that harnesses your orgone energy (by making you have an orgasm while you drive)?

Religious people are technologically sophisticated (unless they're Amish). One of the hilarious things about the portrayal of religious people in cheesy scifi stories is the way they gawk at high-tech items, or start worshipping them. "All hail the mighty Wiimote!", that sort of thing. But you may have noticed that in the real world, religious groups are just as tech-savvy as everybody else who isn't a major geek. They use the Internet for mobilization and outreach, and they're better at using mass media than most secular groups. Think about it this way: has there ever been a useful invention that religious people have refused to use? (Except a few fringe groups.) What would it take for religious people to shun an invention that was genuinely helpful?

Scientific people aren't, as a rule, anti-religion. For every Richard Dawkins, there are tons of scientists and science-zealots who will sort of mumble that studying the wonders of the universe has given them a new appreciation for the possibility that there could be some superior intelligence out there... After all, the existence of a supreme being/first cause/creator is a hypothesis that can be neither proven nor disproven. Even Richard Dawkins admitted that aliens could have "intelligently designed" life on Earth.

Both religion and humanism are fluffy. Most religious people I know are pretty tolerant of other worldviews, and a lot of religious people seem to have only a vague, well-meaning belief in some nebulous (but benevolent) force in the universe. (I'm looking at you, Episcopalians!) Meanwhile, most secular people aren't die-hard pancreas-spitting atheists, but rather humanists, who have a sort of nice, non-threatening belief that people are lovely, and that we're going to keep improving ourselves and getting lovelier. And that eventually, maybe we'll get over our baser instincts and also learn to conquer space.

Atheists can be fanatics too. And then there are the Dawkinses and Christopher Hitchenses of this world, who are just as dogmatic and fundamentalist in their belief that you can prove a negative as the most cross-eyed Cotton Mather wannabe. If a major conflict did strike up between scientific and religious outlooks, it would be as likely to start with the radical atheists as with the radical theists.

Think dystopian. The religious and scientific approaches to the world can coexist reasonably well on a comfy, room-temperature planet with more-or-less adequate resources. But if we see massive ecological disruption in the coming century — as many experts predict — and our planet becomes a much less nice place to live, people will become a lot more desperate. Scientists and religious leaders may have very different ideas on how to handle the wave of disasters and shortages to come — and who's to blame. (Think religious leaders blaming immorality for Hurricane Katrina, for example.) Science, on the other hand, may propose some pretty stringent, if not morally questionable, solutions to the crisis.

I could see the world eventually turning into two blocs: a humanistic superpower that tolerates religion but won't allow it in politics or government, and a quasi-theocracy, where religious leaders hold a lot of sway. Not unlike the Cold War, except the humanistic bloc might be less oppressive than the Soviet Union was. The only real question in my mind is, which of those blocs would the United States align itself with?