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LOLOL! I certainly agree with you that they are "intellectual swindlers" and "black magicians".

IMHO, a scientist who arrives at a strong determinist conclusion from the limitations of his discipline (or ignorance) is one thing, but these two (and Singer) have let their political agenda and evangelistic atheism overtake their science. And it shows...

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. - Lewontin Unraveling of Scientific Materialism

Responding to the question, "In other words, except for science, we haven’t really gotten much further than Descartes when it comes to grounding meaning and existence?" .... Yes, in some sense. But what’s the alternative? It’s not as if there is some coherent alternative that we’re abandoning. It’s not as if God decreed on the day of creation that this is the meaning of life. The same curiosity that leads you to step outside yourself to ask, "Why do we have moral intuitions?" also makes you step outside God’s world and ask, "Well, what told God to create that as the meaning of our existence?" So you still have that gnawing existential anxiety. But let me go back to the question of whether seeing morality as a product of the brain licenses amorality. In practice, it is less dangerous than the idea that morality is ultimately vested in the commands of a religious authority. 9/11 is only the most recent example of a case where morality derived from religion leads to horrible atrocities. - Pinker Reason Interview

Responding to the question, “You are an atheist, although less strident about it than your fellow evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins. Do you ever worry that by pitting Darwin vs. God, mano a mano, evolutionists are encouraging Creationism, since an awful lot of Americans would pick God if forced to choose?” …My criticism of religion in "The Blank Slate" was defensive, meant to counter the argument that morality can only come from a belief in a soul that accepts God's purpose and is rewarded or punished in an afterlife. I think the evidence suggests that this doctrine is false both logically and factually. I don't make a point of criticizing religion in general. Some hard-headed biologists and evolutionary theorists believe that an abstract conception of a divine power is consistent with conventional Darwinism. - Singer UPI Interview

I just think they're both "intellectual swindlers,"

You are right. We deny the notion of predestination all day long in the very way that we live, and so do they. The idea that we are without free will is a way of excusing the otherwise difficult to excuse.

Nevertheless, there is an element of truth. As organisms we are designed to respond a certain way to certain stimuli in our hardwired motor responses, and you could say that our firmware is designed such that we will tend to react a certain way to certain situations.

We are afterall rather well designed creatures who can be predicted to do certain things under certain circumstances, and even if individuals vary, in the agregate we are very predictable.

But proving that we operate according to design does not eliminate free will, because that is also a part of the design. Its part of the distributed intelligence built into the design. Each part of the system must have the capability of judging the unique situation it finds itself in and acting on its own initiative. To say that free will is part of the design doesn't eliminate free will, obviously.

There is a risk in this approach of allowing individual initiative at the point of the spear, so to speak, but it is in many ways self-correcting. The autonomous actors have the ability to recognize error and correct for it, and they have the ability to recognize error in their fellows and help them to correct themselves, and even to destroy those who have become toxic to the whole.

And they have the ability to absorb higher truths which are broadcast to the whole by means of individuals who either self-select for that, from their fellows, from their families, and we of course believe from the Creator himself. These higher truths go a long way toward assuring that the free actors out at the edges will generally tend to go where they ought. But although much in their internal design and much in reality itself will tend to direct them where they need to go, they nonetheless can and do apply themselves as they see fit, or fail to do so as they see fit.