Posted on 12/07/2007 6:34:47 AM PST by Sopater
DES MOINES, December 6, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An intelligent design think tank has revealed a conspiracy to deny an Iowa State University astronomer tenure on the basis of his belief that God created the universe.
Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, a member of the Iowa State faculty and author of the book The Privileged Planet, was decried as an "idiot" and "religious nutcase" in private faculty e-mails made public by the Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think-tank based in Seattle.
The e-mails brought to light a secret campaign among the other Iowa State faculty to deny Gonzalez tenure because of his belief that science shows proof of an intelligent designer of creation, and his refusal to follow a strictly Darwinian atheism.
Gonzalez's tenure was denied in May, and a subsequent appeal was denied by Iowa State University President Gregory Geoffroy in June. Free speech advocates and intelligent design intellectuals want the Iowa Board of Regents to reconsider Gonzalez's tenure.
"Dr. Gonzalez's rights to academic freedom, free speech and a fair tenure process were trampled on by colleagues who were driven by ideological zeal when they should have made an impartial evaluation of Gonzalez's notable accomplishments as a scientist," said a spokesman for the Discovery Institute.
This sort of incident is not unusual on campuses everywhere, as atheistic academics do not hesitate to persecute anybody who does not subscribe to a purely materialistic worldview. The film "EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed," due for release in February 2008, explores the intolerance rife in today's universities and colleges, exposing mistreatment much like that of Gonzalez.
The film features interviews with scientists including biologists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers who have had their ideas suppressed for questioning the materialist theory.
“This sort of incident is not unusual on campuses everywhere, as atheistic academics do not hesitate to persecute anybody who does not subscribe to a purely materialistic worldview. The film “EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed,” due for release in February 2008, explores the intolerance rife in today’s universities and colleges, exposing mistreatment much like that of Gonzalez.”
What about the LIBERAL academics who harass conservative students and deny tenure to conservative professors?
Our Universities are pits of socialism.
How very inclusive and diverse of them to be so multicultural and understanding and tolerant of others beliefs....
Gonzalez didn’t observe a crucial rule of academia: DO NOT do anything
different than the faculty herd.
UNTIL you’ve got tenure.
Then you can be even a raving nutter, if you wish.
Or something more hated than pedophiles by many academics...
somebody that doesn’t sing the praises of total atheistic materialism
loud and clear 24/7.
I feel sorry for him, but he was a bit naive.
That’s not a conspiracy. It’s namecalling and normal academic backbiting, only with a more deserving subject than sometimes happens.
If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of academic waters.
Easy solution: Eliminate “tenure”.
Why should teachers have guaranteed jobs for life? And where can I get tenure for my job?
(hint: I cannot. I have to prove my own worth every day)
Public education union teachers are increasingly among the most irresponsibly leftist individuals around, and it’s because they’re fat and lazy, and have too much free time on their hands.
Time for some competition.
Eliminate tenure now!
I know lots of scientists - most are not atheists.
“The e-mails brought to light a secret campaign among the other Iowa State faculty to deny Gonzalez tenure because of his belief that science shows proof of an intelligent designer of creation, and his refusal to follow a strictly Darwinian atheism.”
Before you IDers get worked up - we don’t know what happened, only how the Discovery Institute, who I don’t find to be trustworthy, said. We don’t see the emails. THe article just characterized them. Does he use his class to prostheletize? I don’t think there’s room for that in a science classroom!
How about this characterization - Someone stole a private email discussion about a guy up for tenure, and made it public without the permission of the conversation owners. How were the emails obtained? Were laws broken in obtaining them? DId they really represent a conspiracy, or just a conversation between people in no position to make the decision on his tenure? Maybe there are other reasons he wouldn’t get tenure? Who knows.
Lifesite usually carries great pro-life news stories. I wish they wouldn’t inject themselves into this unrelated debate!
There have been quite a few threads covering this. A search shows them dating back to a least May.
Agree on all counts.
This rehash is just a hook on which to hang a movie blurb.
Plus those minor details of publishing practically zilch in scholarly journals, and hardly any of those as first author, and graduating only one student.
If you aren’t a productive assistant professor, you can’t expect to get tenure.
I demand affirmative action for zombies and unproductive assistant professors!
I lost a position as an English Decomposition instructor for, ostensibly, the same reason. I demand justice! (and brrraaaaiiiinzzzz...)
Non-believers felt left out of the Romney speech yesterday.
But perhaps they should consider how they want other people who disagree with their Darwinian, Global Warming etc. beliefs left out.......
“You cannot play chess with the rules of checkers. You can play, but what you will be playing will not be chess.”
Science is as ordered a process as the game of chess, and it likewise has very specific rules. The problem lies with those who believe that science *defines* the universe. It does not.
It is an abstract like mathematics. If a mathematician wrote a terribly complex equation to describe an apple, all he will have done is write an equation. He has not made an apple, nor has he even *defined* an apple. It is just one way of looking at the real thing that is an apple.
His equation may be terribly accurate, but waving it around and saying “This is an apple”, is incorrect.
The same thing applies to science. If you want to do a scientific experiment, you have to follow very precise rules. If you do so, all you have done is followed the rules of a scientific experiment. You have played a game of chess. Nothing more and nothing less.
Napoleon Bonaparte used military units like chess pieces. He moved them like chess pieces on a chess board. The units themselves were even like the pieces in many ways. And like in a chess game, he outmaneuvered and defeated most of his opponents. But it was all an illusion.
His soldiers were real people, led by good leaders over real terrain in real weather and against a real enemy. And despite the surface appearance of a chess game, it was their individual actions that resulted in winning or losing, not anything to do with chess. Chess just made it easier to understand on paper.
But after Napoleon, for many years, modern militaries around the world studied chess intently, thinking they could replicate Napoleon’s success by learning how to fight by those rules.
The same situation applies to science. Scientists do experiments, then both scientists and non-scientists extrapolate from their experiments to the world as a whole. And often it works. So much so that people are often fooled into believing that science *defines* the universe, not that it is just a description of the universe. So they assume a lot of things about science that it isn’t.
Enter Creation Science. It is not science. It is not scientific. But it believes that science defines the universe. It is playing a game on a chess board with chess pieces, but checkers rules.
There is no role for God in chess. At no point during the game does one side lose his queen because God decrees it in the rules according to Hoyle. God might indeed influence a player to lose his queen, but it is not officially part of the game.
The same with science. God is not in the rules of science. In fact if God were to noticeably involve Himself with an experiment, it would invalidate it, and it would no longer be science.
And while a goodly number of scientists are indeed atheists, any good scientist should also refrain from injecting God into any part of science. Or else it isn’t science.
Much the same as invoking God, to change the rules at a chess tournament, will not be accepted. Atheist chess players or not, it will not be tolerated. Players may still be free to thank God for winning after the fact, but at no time is God allowed as an official part of play.
All of this points to science instruction. To be fair, science education must teach two things: that science has rules to *be* scientific; and that science just describes the universe, it does not define the universe. Therefore God remains in his church, but not in the lab, and not in the classroom. And science remains in the lab and the classroom, but only has the sway in the rest of the world as men see fit to give it.
Trying to prove the existence of God with the rules of science is self-defeating. Queen to King 4 checkmate also does not prove the existence of God.
Question: When are they actually going to discover something?Answer: When the fire all of their lawyers, PR flaks, and journalists and hire some scientists to do real research. In other words, never.
How does the Zomborigin Fellows for Institutional Discovery of Brainz sound?
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/050811_scientists_god.html
Nearly 38 percent of natural scientists — people in disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology — said they do not believe in God. Only 31 percent of the social scientists do not believe.
In the new study, Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund surveyed 1,646 faculty members at elite research universities, asking 36 questions about belief and spiritual practices.
Evolution should be subdivided into two different concepts.
One is the obvious and scientifically verifiable concept of natural selection, which is not inherently objectionable to Creation Science advocates. That is, that in any contest for life or reproduction, one of the contestants will prove superior to the other, and thus their descent will continue.
The other and controversial aspect of evolution is the theory that on the macro scale inert matter will become life in the right environment and that over a vast period of time natural selection will result in some less developed species becoming different and more developed species.
While the Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated that in the right circumstances amino acids will develop from inert matter, only an extended version of that experiment could ever substantiate the organization of amino acids into a functional protein.
However, even that could be countered with the idea that the intelligent organizational apparatus, while invisible, still exists and is responsible for the recreation of the protein, even in a sealed environment.
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