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Walt J. Ruloff is the CEO of Premise Media Corporation and Executive Producer of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Described as a “serial entrepreneur,” Walt started, built and eventually sold multiple companies in his career. His ventures ranged from snowboard manufacturing to Ecash Technologies to a Multi-Family Real Estate trust. In 2005 Walt turned his full attention to the media and co-founded Premise Media Corporation. We talked with him about his experiences as a first-time filmmaker facing down the scientific community.This film originated because of your personal interest, correct?
Walt: Yes. My background is in software and technology, and after selling my last software company, I was interested in getting into biotech. What really intrigued and troubled me was the approach in biotech that was very different from that of our technology companies.
In technology, in our approach, we were able to think completely outside the box and challenge the current paradigm. We were constantly challenging the current way in which we looked at the process. The presiding orthodoxy was always up for challenge.
What I found that deeply disturbed me in biotech was a deep-seated orthodoxy within biology that just couldn’t be questioned. That’s what originally got us energized to do something.
What we found was that you had to look and interpret the basic tenets of biology through the lens of Darwinian evolution. If there was some contrary evidence or data, you had to figure out a way to re-package it that so it fit back into the reigning orthodoxy. Darwinian evolution is based on random mutation together with natural selection.
So what really intrigued me was the whole aspect of random mutation and something called “adaptation processes,” which meant that within the cell and biology that allowed the biological mechanism to adapt to situations that were definitely not random. As I probed around in that area I realized it was very problematic not because of science but because of politics.
It’s interesting that the problematic nature comes not from science but from politics. The average person doesn’t always consider the political implications of science. How do you hope to challenge the average person to that deeper level of thinking that goes beyond considering it a challenge between the Bible and science?Walt: We really struggled with this because we tried to approach this in a more academic way. Connecting it to the every day average person was a challenge. How do you get people to wake up and think about this problem within biology? It’s really a much larger issue and extremely important that we take it seriously.
A simplistic answer would be that the prevailing dominance of the scientific method that, without people even knowing it, has entered into our society in a very big way. It’s a process that everything has to be reduced to a mechanism or material, observable process. Most importantly, it cannot have any metaphysical implications. If it has any metaphysical implications, that means something outside, something from the Divine.
That has to be eliminated from the landscape; from the political landscape, and very importantly, from law and science. So the elimination of that metaphysical problem, and what we’re observing has very strong indications of that metaphysical, is something very important for people to realize. That’s happening in our daily lives, and it’s why we’re having this disconnect. People that have a faith position have been pushed to the sidelines and regarded as irrational and subjective. That has created a huge void, and it’s caused many problems.
We need to figure out how to integrate both of those spheres again, because like it or not, it’s intrinsic and a huge part of who we are a people. By separating those things, we’ve done a major disservice.
Some of the information you provided on your website was very effective at taking the argument out of the laboratory and making it more understandable to the common person. When you were working on this project, did you encounter scientists who are exploring the area of Intelligent Design, but aren’t necessarily believers?
Walt: Most of them, I would say, fall into the category of “agnostic.” They didn’t know, but they were intellectually honest and said, “There’s evidence here of something other, and I’m going to follow it, even if I’m not a Christian.”
That was great, but the sad thing is that those very scientists, when they went beyond the protocols, were denied tenure or ridiculed and mocked.So people who want to turn this into a faith vs. science issue are actually portraying the dispute inaccurately.
Walt: They’re doing that for strategic reasons. Most of the people doing that are using it as a way of fending off and saying, “See, this is what it’s all about. It’s about religion, and we can’t allow religion to enter into science.” But that’s not what it’s about.
If you really go to an intellectually honest observer of science, who’s actually walking through the scientific method and accepts the metaphysical implications of what he or she is unraveling, those are the ones that are very true. And that’s what it’s all about.
You seem like a man of science yourself. Was your interest and work in software something that came from work you were doing in software engineering, or an investment perspective?
Walt: I started hacking around with computers when I was very young. I started playing around in software and developing systems with other engineers. I started a software company when I was 25, and so initially I was coming from a curiosity point of view, and that became an investment point of view.
The little company I started grew to a company well over 350 or 400 people. We became the worldwide de facto standard in something called Optimizational Logistics Algorithms for large corporations. We came up with mathematical optimizational algorithms and formulas and designed practical applications for large corporations who had worldwide movement of goods across their web. UPS was one of our clients.
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