I.D. Rift Hits Baylor Again (Controversy surrounds University's Evolutionary Informatics Lab)

WACO, Texas (BP)--Baylor University officials ordered the shutdown of a personal website of one of a handful of the school's distinguished professors because of anonymous concerns that the site, hosted on the university’s server, supported Intelligent Design.

Robert Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor, launched a website called the Evolutionary Informatics Lab in June to examine whether Darwinian processes like random mutation and natural selection can generate new information.

Marks' conclusions, as explained on the website, placed limits on the scope of Darwinism and offered scientific support for Intelligent Design.

In July, a podcast interview with Marks appeared on a website run by the pro-ID Discovery Institute, and a week later Benjamin Kelley, dean of engineering at Baylor, told Marks to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website immediately.

"This is a big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID," William Dembski, a research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press.

"Robert Marks is a world-class expert in the field of evolutionary computing, and yet the Baylor administration, without any consideration of the actual content of Marks' work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to Intelligent Design," Dembski said.

Dembski himself was at the center of a controversy involving Baylor and Intelligent Design in 2000 when he was removed from his post as director of the school's Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design after refusing to rescind a statement supporting Intelligent Design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry.

Lori Fogleman, director of media communications at Baylor, told Baptist Press Sept. 5 that the school's objection to the website involves standards by which something can or cannot attach its name to Baylor.

"This isn't about the content of the website. Really the issue is related to Baylor's policies and procedures of approving centers, institutes, products using the university's name," Fogleman said. "Baylor reserves the exclusive right to the use of its own name, and we're pretty jealous in the protection of that name. So it has nothing to do with the content but is all about how one goes about establishing a center, an institute, a product using the university's name."

In response to the dean's order to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website, Marks requested a meeting with Baylor legal counsel to resolve the matter. Six days before the scheduled Aug. 9 meeting, Kelley entered Marks' Baylor webspace and, without his consent, removed all references to the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, according to a timeline Dembski sent to BP.

The Aug. 9 meeting involved John Gilmore, an attorney who advised Dembski in 2000 and now represents Marks, Baylor Provost Randall O'Brien, Kelley and Baylor attorneys including Charles Beckenhauer, chief counsel for the school. Baylor officials asked that Marks add a disclaimer to his website and remove anything that could imply the lab is a Baylor initiative.

"Randall O'Brien signs off on the EIL site going back up and closes the meeting with prayer," Dembski's timeline states.

An Aug. 21 e-mail from Beckenhauer to Gilmore included what the Baylor chief counsel called his "proposed fixes" to the website, which by then existed only as a mirror site, not viewable by the general public. Gilmore responded by saying the matter had been settled at the Aug. 9 meeting with the provost and that Beckenhauer's recommendations were out of line.

On Aug. 30, Beckenhauer told Gilmore via e-mail that "there is now a long trail of information that inappropriately links independent research to the Baylor name," and he said the website issue centered on "misleading representations of your client and his collaborator (Dr. Dembski)."

Research papers that Dembski and Marks wrote jointly were on the website, and Dembski said his connection with the lab had been evident from the start.

Beckenhauer said the Aug. 9 meeting was not meant to be a final agreement, and he expressed concerns that Marks and Dembski had created a "trail of inaccuracies" that would lead people to believe Baylor had given direct support for what in reality was an independent project.

"All the circumstantial evidence points to John Lilley, Baylor's president, as being behind this effort to stamp out ID at Baylor," Dembski told Baptist Press. "The provost was at the crucial Aug. 9 meeting; the president wasn't. Lilley is the only one with the authority to overturn what the provost agreed to at that meeting."

Dembski, in comments to the Southern Baptist Texan newsjournal Sept. 4, underscored the hypersensitivity surrounding Intelligent Design in scholastic institutions these days.

"You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past," he said. "To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel."

Dembski said he knows of several faculty members at Baylor who support Intelligent Design, but they are mostly younger faculty who don't have tenure and don't speak up on the topic. An old guard at Baylor, he said, supports secularization.

"John Lilley, in attempting to pacify that old guard, and perhaps because of a sense of foreboding about how Baylor might be perceived in the wider university culture if it were seen as supporting Intelligent Design or as even allowing it merely a presence, has therefore decided to come down hard against it," Dembski said.

Intelligent Design "in a sense became a poster child" of what immediate past president Robert Sloan tried to accomplish at Baylor, seeking to rescue the Baptist General Convention of Texas-affiliated school from its slide into secularization before he resigned under pressure in 2005, Dembski noted.

Aside from the hot-button issue of Intelligent Design, Dembski said the way the Baylor administration has dealt with Marks in this case is "inexcusable by any standard, certainly Christian but even secular."

"I've been at MIT, Princeton University, Notre Dame, Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Chicago, and at none of these schools have I ever have witnessed the shameful treatment that Baylor has accorded to Robert Marks," Dembski said.

"... [Marks] was a star in his department at the University of Washington in Seattle for 26 years before Baylor recruited him, and now Baylor is subjecting him to treatment that even so 'liberal' and 'secular' a place as UW would find unconscionable," Dembski added. "Yes, there are academic freedom issues here, but at this point the issue is one of plain decency."

Robert Crowther of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture told Baptist Press the institute is watching the Marks situation from an academic freedom standpoint.

"We're deeply concerned that the administration at Baylor University has really not shown any support for academic freedom or freedom of scientific inquiry in shutting down a website and a research project of one of their distinguished faculty," Crowther said. "We find that very troubling. It does show a certain trend at Baylor."

Crowther said he believes Intelligent Design has become such a controversial issue in academia because of the scientific threat it poses. The Scopes Trial should have settled the issue, he said, but discoveries since then have altered the discussion.

"What has changed is the science. We know things now and there are new discoveries being made all the time that are leading a number of scientists to not just question Darwinian evolution but to actively pursue research into Intelligent Design," Crowther said. "The thing that is driving this really is the science. We wouldn't be having the debate if there wasn't something going on in science that was causing a lot of questions to rise from most of the scientists."

“You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past,” he said. “To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel.”
Dembski, in comments to the Southern Baptist Texan newsjournal Sept. 4

OFFENSE OF THE GOSPEL? Here is Dumbski’s trump card. Gospel. He thinks he is defending the revealed word of God against Science. He thinks that a Baptist University should ignore any fact that opposes his interpretation of the Bible, because to him it is an offense of the Gospel.

This is Science? Thanks. I needed the laugh.

Simple, I forgot ( I believe I said it before ).

I suggest that anyone interested in your claim that you "just forgot" click on the link and observe that you were immediately challenged to provide a link and a credit to Dembski. The thread went on for several days, and you never responded.

Let's face it, when you post a thread, you are required to post the author of the article and the the URL of the web page from which you are quoting. You can't "simply forget."

Assuming you can't read well enough to notice that you have filled out false information when posting, it is customary, when others point out your mistake, to post a correction or ask a moderator to make the correction.

So to answer your next question, I will not stop calling attention to this until you provide a plausible explanation or go back to the original thread and post a correction. I've given you the link.

Back to the thread topic? Well here is where we let off:

ID proponents could put a rather rapid end to their persecution simply by publishing a testable hypothesis that is consistent with currently available data, and which projects data yet to be found.

One can only characterize as crank science, a conjecture that asserts an unspecified entity did something at some unspecified time using unspecified methods for unknown reasons.

It is difficult to argue against the proposition that a entity having infinite capabilities might have been the cause of everything we see. Perhaps gravity really is a manifestation of angels pushing and pulling things around. Prove otherwise.

Science, of course, does not attempt to prove otherwise. It simply asks the question, “Can we find regularities in nature that obviate the need for hypothesising demiurges having arbitrary means, methods and motives?” Anyone not asking this question is not engaging in science.

I have asked you a number of times a very simple question: Are you Bill Dembski, or do you contribute in any way to his website? You have never given a straight yes or no answer.

OK, I'll give you a straight answer since your interest is in getting personal and not addressing the more pressing issue of Intelligent Design vs. Neo-Dariwinism.

1) NO. I AM NOT WILLIAM DEMBSKI.

2) YES, I DO "CONTRIBUTE" TO HIS WEBSITE. Not in terms of posting articles ( because I do not have the privileges for that ), but as a poster IN RESPONSE to his articles and those written by other privileged contributors.

Now, let's get back to the issue at hand.

ID proponents could put a rather rapid end to their persecution simply by publishing a testable hypothesis that is consistent with currently available data, and which projects data yet to be found.

Nice to know that we're back on track.

Notice what Dembski and Marks are actually doing -- THEY ARE DOING WORK THAT *TESTS* their theories. Now how on earth can you publish something if the very *act* of working on it is being suppressed ?

*THAT* has always been the issue.

One can only characterize as crank science, a conjecture that asserts an unspecified entity did something at some unspecified time using unspecified methods for unknown reasons.

Well, since random mutation is an entity that has never been observed to produce the complexity that we see, then it looks like that qualifies as well....

It is difficult to argue against the proposition that a entity having infinite capabilities might have been the cause of everything we see.

As it is difficult to argue that a non-entity might have been the cause of everything. THAT is the reason why after over a hundred years of trying to convince the public ( including taking control of most of academia ), Darwinists aren't making any dent at all.

Perhaps gravity really is a manifestation of angels pushing and pulling things around. Prove otherwise.

Notice how you are equating an OBSERVED phenomenon with unobserved ones -- Random mutation.

Science, of course, does not attempt to prove otherwise. It simply asks the question, “Can we find regularities in nature that obviate the need for hypothesising demiurges having arbitrary means, methods and motives?” Anyone not asking this question is not engaging in science. Disagree. We can also ask a simple question --- When we find regularities and complexity in nature ( as we do ), is the phenomenon better explained by design or chance ?

ID even makes certain predictions (if their hypothesis is true ):
(1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.
(2) Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.
(3) Genes and functional parts will be re-used in different unrelated organisms.

(4) The genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless "junk DNA".

Do you have a link to this?

Creationists used to say these were predictions of evolutionary biology, except for #1.

It does everything to discredit Dumbski as a Scientist. It also discredits him as a theologists. When facts confront someone’s interpretation of the Bible it is their interpretation that is in error, not the facts.

“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”

Saint Thomas Aquinas

It does everything to discredit Dumbski as a Scientist.

I notice from your arrogant remark how you deliberatly mis-spelled his name, as if doing so does anything to discredit him.

Also, it does nothing of that sort. Baylor is a Christian university whose administrators still believe in the gospel. Dembski was speaking to them on their own terms ( i.e. their own belief ).

There is nothing that says because a scientist is a Christian ( as Newton and Kepler were ) who uses language others can relate to, his work is therefore discredited.

If this were so, then Newton's treatise on eschatology would disqualify him as scientist.

It also discredits him as a theologists.

The correct term is Theologian. I guess using the wrong term disqualifies you from pronouncing judgment on other people's competence. BTW, Demski, aside from having taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas, has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. Dr. Dembski is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy. He He also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago.

Now get this, he also happens to have a Master of Divinity from Princeton Thological Seminary. I'd like to know what degree you have in this area that qualifies you to say he is a discredited "theologist" (sic).

When facts confront someone’s interpretation of the Bible it is their interpretation that is in error, not the facts.

Facts, such as what ?

“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”

Well thank you St. Thomas. Believing that mindless matter can itself create human beings and a habitable planet is probably one of those he had in mind. After all, he was the one who articulated the Cosmological argument.

Do you have a link to this? Creationists used to say these were predictions of evolutionary biology, except for #1.

Yes, see here

People often confuse creationism with Intelligent Design because the two seem similar. But there are differences as well. Chief among them is this -- there are numerous ID proponents who don't subscribe to young earth creationism. Many ID proponents ( like Mathematician David Berlinski and Molecular Biologist Michael Denton ) are agnostic in fact. Michael Behe, one of the foremost proponents of ID and the one who popularized the term, Irreducible Complexity actually is on record as believing in common descent. This in itself separates him from the Biblical creationists.

Neither The Institute for Creation Research nor Answers In Genesis fully support or endorse Intelligent Design.

He thinks Baptists are too stupid to understand Science? He has to speak to them ‘in their own language’ about ‘offense of the gospel’ that would be committed by acceptance of Science?

You are deliberately misunderstanding his point. He was not talking about science but likening what the school is doing to the powers that be in the first century suppresing the church'ws message for their "offense" of preaching the gospel.

I challenge you to read any one of Dembski's scientific papers and tell me whether you can find anything relating to God, the Bible or Jesus Christ in them. There is none.

So no, Dembski does not say that Baptists are too stupid to understand science. he is simply saying that what they are doing is akin to the powers that be in the early church age suppressing the message of the gospel.

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