Academia's Assault on Intelligent Design

Townhall ^ | May 27,2007 | Ken Connor

[SirLinksalot]

There is evidence for intelligent design in the universe." This does not seem like an especially radical statement; many people believe that God has revealed himself through creation. Such beliefs, however, do not conform to politically correct notions in academia, as Professor Guillermo Gonzalez is learning the hard way. An astronomer at Iowa State University, Professor Gonzalez was recently denied tenure—despite his stellar academic record—and it is increasingly clear he was rejected for one reason: He wrote a book entitled The Privileged Planet which showed that there is evidence for design in the universe.& nbsp; Dr. Gonzalez's case has truly distressing implications for academic freedom in colleges and universities across the country, especially in science departments.

Dr. Gonzalez, who fled from Cuba to America as a child, earned his PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington. By academic standards, Dr. Gonzalez has had a remarkable career. Though still a young man, he has already authored sixty-eight peer-reviewed scientific papers. These papers have been featured in some of the world's most respected scientific journals, including Science and Nature. Dr. Gonzalez has also co-authored a college-level text book entitled Observational Astronomy, which was published by Cambridge Press.

According to the written requirements for tenure at the Iowa State University, a prospective candidate is required to have published at least fifteen peer-reviewed scientific papers. With sixty-eight papers to his name, Dr. Gonzalez has already exceeded that requirement by 350%. Ninety-one percent of professors who applied for tenure at Iowa State University this year were successful, implying that there has to be something seriously wrong with a candidate before they are rejected.

What's wrong with Dr. Gonzalez? So far as anyone can tell, this rejection had little to do with his scientific research, and everything to do with the fact that Dr. Gonzalez believes the scientific evidence points to the idea of an intelligent designer. In fact, as World Magazine has reported, at least two scientists in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the Iowa State University have admitted that intelligent design played a role in their decision. This despite the fact that Dr. Gonzalez does not teach intelligent design in any of his classes, and that none of his peer-reviewed papers deal with the subject. Nevertheless, simply because Gonzalez holds the view that there is intelligence behind the universe, and has written a book presenting scientific evidence for this fact, he is considered unsuitable at Iowa State.

What is the state of academic freedom when well qualified candidates are rejected simply because they see God's fingerprints on the cosmos? Isn't the Academy supposed to be a venue for diverse views? Aren't universities supposed to foster an atmosphere that allows for robust discussion and freedom of thought? Dr. Gonzalez's fate suggests that anyone who deigns to challenge conventional orthodoxy is not welcome in the club.

In the future, will scientists who are up for tenure be forced to deny that God could have played any role in the creation or design of the universe? Will Bible-believing astronomers be forced to repudiate Psalm 19, which begins, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands"? Will faithful Catholics be required to reject the teaching of Vatican I, which said that God "can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason..." Just where will this witch hunt lead?

The amazing fact is that, even as many science departments are working overtime to forbid professors from positing that there is evidence for intelligent design in the universe, more and more scientists are coming to this conclusion. The Discovery Institute has compiled a list of over seven-hundred scientists who signed the following statement: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged." The list of scientists who find good reason to doubt the strictly materialistic Darwinism that is currently scientific orthodoxy is growing every day.

It seems that many scientists and academicians who hold views contrary to Dr. Gonzalez have concluded that the best way to avoid debate about the evidence for intelligent design is to simply deny jobs to those who will not affirm their atheistic worldview. The fact that these scientists, who are supposedly open to following the evidence wherever it leads, have resorted to blatant discrimination to avoid having this conversation speaks volumes about the weakness of their position. They realize their arguments are not sufficient to defeat the intelligent design movement and they must, therefore, shut their opponents out of the conversation. All the evidence suggests that it is unjust that Dr. Gonzalez was denied tenure and that this ruling should be overturned on appeal. Nevertheless, what happened to Dr. Gonzalez is a reflection of the growing strength of the intelligent design movement, not its weakness.

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Ken Connor is Chairman of the Center for a Just Society in Washington, DC and a nationally recognized trial lawyer who represented Governor Jeb Bush in the Terri Schiavo case.

[SirLinksalot]

Does belief in Panspermia ( i.e., a hypothesis that the seeds of life are prevalent throughout the Universe, and furthermore that life on Earth began by such seeds landing on Earth and propagating.) count as intelligent design ?

No less a distinguished scientist than E.O. Wilson (Pellegrino Research Professor in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University) seems to be attracted to it. There is a hypothesis that alien lifeforms seeded earth eons ago with microorganisms to produce life as we know it.

See here for instance :

http://www.panspermia.org/whatsnew.htm

It says :

“E.O. Wilson thinks panspermia is likely: Some serious biologists – and I count myself among them – have begun to wonder that among the enormous and still unknown diversity of microorganisms one might – just might – find aliens among them – true aliens that arrived from outer space. They’ve had billions of years to do it. But especially during the earliest period of biological evolution on this planet. We do know that some bacterial species that have earthly origin are capable of almost unimaginable extremes of temperature and other harsh changes in environment, including hard radiation strong enough to crack the Pyrex vessels around the growing population of bacteria.”

[yahoo]

Keep those strawmen coming!

[ahayes]

Does belief in Panspermia ( i.e., a hypothesis that the seeds of life are prevalent throughout the Universe, and furthermore that life on Earth began by such seeds landing on Earth and propagating.) count as intelligent design ?

No more than it counts as "intelligent design" if a species of bee settles a new island and evolves into several different species, or if our Mars crawlers deposit bacteria from Earth in the rocks that somehow survive and evolve into new bacterial species.

[js1138]

Does belief in Panspermia ( i.e., a hypothesis that the seeds of life are prevalent throughout the Universe, and furthermore that life on Earth began by such seeds landing on Earth and propagating.) count as intelligent design ?

Panspermia is not in opposition to evolution.

Evolution is a theory of change in populations, not a theory of origins of life. Lateral transfer is not in opposition to evolution. Gene transfer is one of many mechanisms of change.

Regardless of the source of variation, some individuals will have more reproductive success than others. This is true of artificially engineered organisms as well as ones arising from mutation. Selection by humans did not protect the Irish potato from natural selection. There is not enough computing power on earth or possible in theory to anticipate all the possible ecological changes that can occur.

Even if the original living things were created in an instant, evolution describes how populations adapt and change over time.

[js1138]

My post #144 was intended for you.

[sirchtruth]

"Digital design of DNA:" Talk about begging the question...

Alright, from one who must wear tightass logic pants, I'll put it another way...

WHO or WHAT introduces the sequence in a DNA chain?

I'll remind you "information" just doesn't spontaneously erupt.

[sirchtruth]

But, don't you know that order and complexity are NOT indications of intelligence or design? *roll eyes*

LOL! It just seems so twisted when supposed scientist insist something is absolutely, NOT an indication of something!

[metmom]

I'll remind you "information" just doesn't spontaneously erupt.

But according to the naturalistic philosophy, everything just sort of happened and somehow got together and started self-replicating, and......

I googled "origin of life" and went to the Wiki article just for the summary. What a joke. What they won't stretch to try to figure out how it happened without help.

[Rudder]

No, I meant of the specifier, “Darwinian.” How is that distinguished from the broader concept of heritability?

[Rudder]

...I object to in this debate is the heated assertion that a statistical inference -- in this and apparently only this -- case cannot be admitted into the discussion.

So far as I can recall, I've not made any strenuous use of inferential statistics, nor said they were inadmissible. I guess I need more details.

[Rudder]

The problem is that the "original version" and not a perversion of it, is what led to eugenics.

So you say. Prove it.

The eugenics movement is a gross perversion of Darwin.

[Rudder]

At this point in time ID will have to establish itself-—not by discussion-—by hard data, and hard data alone, if it is to enter the realm of science.

[Rudder]

WHO or WHAT introduces the sequence in a DNA chain?

Repeated effectiveness in surviving.

[Rudder]

How exactly does one ensure pure randomness in a clinically controlled setting?

In the assignment of subjects or the assignment of various treatments, a table of random numbers is often used as one of many approaches.

[omnivore]

"So Christians should be excluded from tenured public university positions?"

No, not in general. But if a person, in the scholarly writings they put down on their CV/resume, includes publications which argue for unphysical or supernatural explanations for natural phenomena, or, say, a literalist interpretation of creation myths such as those in Genesis, as an explanation for the natural world we find around us, they would clearly be unqualified for tenured positions in departments such as geology, astronomy, biology, etc. The department would face losing accreditation for their program, for one thing. The students seeking legitimate teaching in their chosen field would not put up with it, for another. (Complaint from student to Dean: "I want to get into a grad school and specialize in quasars that are 12 billion years old, but my senior thesis advisor is telling me nothing is more than 6000 years old." No Dean is going to put himself in that position.) They may well be qualified for a tenured position in a religion department at a Bible college, I wouldn't know.

A lot of departments have been imploding for decades due to political influences. Literature and other humanities, for instance, which are collapsing under things like postmodernism, critical theory, all manner of politically driven race/class/gender theories. Departments of literature discarded their scholarly standards and embraced their "critics," and look what happened, they turned into laughingstocks of nonsense. Nobody in the sciences wants to see that happen by letting in politically motivated "critics" of science. Which the Discovery Institute clearly is.

[Rudder]

The anthropic principle most explicitly does not say the universe was made to suit us. We just happen to be living at a time a place where it does.

I guess that settles that.

So, from now on, if asked why there's life on earth, my answer can be a truthful, "just because." While this could well be true, we really don't know if it is. More scientific research is needed.

But yet, those of the ID persuasion use the anthropic principle as strong evidence of there being an Intelligent Creator and, at the same time, argue that their postulates are scientifically-derived.

Back to the old saw for me: show me some data.

[gcruse]

” More scientific research is needed.”

The only way to test the theory is to find universes besides ours with different properties and see if there is life there. Good luck with that. I’d say there’s life in the universe because it there weren’t we wouldn’t be here to miss it.

[omnivore]

"Does belief in Panspermia ... count as intelligent design ?"

Using the same term, in this case "intelligent design," to mean two or more different things, is to cause confusion deliberately. Panspermia theory is clearly not what the Discovery Institute means by "Intelligent Design," so I wouldn't include it in this discussion.

There are at least two versions of Panspermia. One just pushes the abiogenic origin of life off earth and puts is somewhere else. Such a simple change of location for an event would not affect whether it was a purely physical event or there was supernatural intervention needed, so it would hardly matter to the present debate. Another also makes the same change of location for abiogenic origin of life, but also adds the twist of "space aliens" (little green men, etc.) going around deliberately seeding planets with life, like farmers seeding soil. But those green guys would have had to come from somewhere, etc., again, it just pushes the same questions off to another locale and circumstance, it doesn't change the fundamental dynamics of the question of whether or not there are links between the natural and supernatural world.

The panspermia meme comes up again and again on these threads wherever evolution comes up for a bashing. Is it on some Talking Points being handed out by one of the Creationist outfits? I don't get the big interest in it.

Hard to imagine what difference panspermia would make. If life is ubiquitous in the universe, it would still evolve the same way it does here on earth. Same universe, same rules. Methane has the same properties on Neptune as on earth, helium has the same properties on Arcturus as it does on our sun. I don't see what a change of venue buys.

[Rudder]

Darwin’s dangerous idea gives us every reason to think that science, perhaps on the part of you or one of your fellow neuroscientists, will show that purpose to have been merely epiphenomenal i.e. an illusion.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, is there a sound? No.

As perceivers we are all constrained by phenomenology.

Where is the totality of the universe? Between our ears.

[Rudder]

I’d say there’s life in the universe because it there weren’t we wouldn’t be here to miss it.

Rewrite. I can't comprehend.