That heavily depends on the views and attitudes. When hiring scientists, religious views are not among the criteria, and that is true in the vast majority of professions.
I wouldn’t lower my estimation of that person’s scientific competence. I would judge them by the science they have done. If they are productive then their beliefs outside of their scientific work doesn’t bother me at all.
What about views that do not consider themselves to be conclusions derived from religion, but conclusions derived from science, such as intelligent design? That’s really the issue in all such cases. No one is suggesting that scientists discriminate against Gonzalez or other ID proponents because they are Presbyterian as opposed to Baptist, or Christian as opposed to Jewish. The suggestion is that many scientists would never vote to hire anyone known to support ID, even if that scientist’s work was otherwise perfectly good. And as I pointed out to you – to your resolute silence – one of the voting faculty at Iowa State confessed later on that Gonzalez’s ID views (not the fact that he was a Christian, but his ID views) were a factor in his thinking about giving Gonzalez tenure. I already granted that Gonzalez might not have received tenure anyway, but at least for this person, a prejudice against ID was running through his mind as he decided. Are you saying that in the same position, you would not have felt that prejudice?
That right, not very impressive reasoning, and not my reasoning, either. You are a poor interpreter of my written words.
Thanks for admitting you have no point and are just knee-jerk defending anything remotely connected with ID.
If they are labeling themselves as an ID scientist who is going to do ID research and the only thing to come out of that work thus far is a non-fiction book, then that would be a problem.
If ID is science and Gonzalez claims to be doing ID science, then why shouldn’t it be factored in?
Did Gonzalez label himself as “an ID scientist” or just as a scientist, in particular, an astronomer? Did he say that he intended to do ID research at Iowa State?
You’re answering a question with a question. Why not answer it with an answer? If you were in the Astronomy department at Iowa State, and if (for the sake of argument) he had done enough telescope time, supervised enough grad students, researched enough articles while at Iowa State, etc., and if none of those articles had anything to do with ID, and if he had never taught ID in his classes, but still had written that popular book, would you have been inclined to vote against him, due to your view that ID is bad science, or not science at all, and that there must something defective in the scientific thinking of anyone who would go in for ID? Would you have had a strong desire not to have a departmental colleague like that? And might such considerations have tipped your vote? I don’t see why this should be hard for you to answer. Surely you know your own mind, your own prejudices, your own temptations, and the strength of your own opinions regarding ID, well enough to give a clear response.
I thought we were talking about generalities?
I would not have voted against him. If he was productive then I would have supported giving him tenure. His ID views wouldn’t have factored in at all.
If he had not been productive then you have to ask why. If a scientist’s view boils down to a God of the Gaps, then that can be a strong motivator not to seek new knowledge. If their actions mirror this motivation, then it is certainly something to consider. If, on the other hand, Gonzalez had been gathering lots of data and working hard but had ideas that just didn’t pan out then that would really help his case. This is a lifetime appointment, after all. You want to know that they are productive and will continue to be productive.
Good. I am glad to hear this. From your several more oblique statements in other posts, the more natural inference was that you thought ID was such junk science that you couldn’t take wholly seriously as a scientist anyone who endorsed it, even if his peer-reviewed scientific work was otherwise squeaky-clean. I’m glad to hear I drew the wrong inference.
Or maybe, just maybe, there were attempts to “discount” the paper because there were actual flaws with the paper that meant it shouldn’t have been published in the first place, the murkiness of the publication procedure aside. Even if the publication procedure was entirely above board doesn’t mean the paper was actually flawless. I’m sure you’re aware that peer-review isn’t flawless, and sometimes dreck slips through the gaps. The probably of this happening increases as the quality/prominence of the journal decreases.
I can give several examples of papers explicitly arguing for intelligent design in peer-reviewed journals years before Meyer got his paper published. The DI even references them. If the journal is bad/unrelated enough, they can be published. That shouldn’t be cause for celebration among IDers.
Your source for this is probably Wikipedia – the most biased source imaginable regarding the politics of origins questions – but Wikipedia actually undermines itself, because while the Wikipedia author (with the usual sloppiness of Wikipedia authors on these issues) uses the word “retraction”, the actual statement of the BSW (quoted on Wikipedia) does not employ the word “retraction”. “Retraction” is a special term in these matters, so the avoidance of the term is significant.
The only irregularity in the process cited by BSW is lack of consultation with an associate editor; the reader might infer from your statement that the article was not sent out to peer reviewers – which it was. And even the one irregularity cited was not an irregularity, according to Sternberg, who as managing editor at the time presumably knew the rules; also, he did consult with a BSW scientist about the article; see:
http://www.richardsternberg.com/smithsonian.php?page=facts
Everything was above board; the furor was caused by the fact that some people didn’t like the conclusions of Meyer’s paper. But that’s tough. Scientists disagree with each other. If you can’t take disagreement, don’t be a scientist.
The wedge strategy makes it pretty clear that those are/were the DI’s goals, at least to some extent. They talk about the cultural effects of materialism, how God-given objective morality has been rejected, etc. They pretty explicitly target the criminal justice system, saying:
Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.
and:
Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.
and one of their 20-year goals was:
To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.
It’s not difficult to connect the dots. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Christianity-based “design theory” permeating “religious, cultural, moral and political life” would be a theocracy.
I’ve just been following it for the last 5 years, and I’m not American, so I didn’t get to witness most of the “culture war” aspects of the “debate” in the mid-2000s.
I didn’t say the paper was flawless. The accusation here was that it was not properly peer-reviewed. That was the only claim I was responding to. It does count as a peer-reviewed paper, whether one thinks it was a good paper or not.
Sternberg gives great detail about the process on his website. Nothing looks irregular to me. Say the Meyer paper was lousy if you like – I won’t respond to that charge, because I’m not here to defend ID on the level of contents. I’m here to plead for argumentative and rhetorical fairness. People can love ID or hate ID, as far as I’m concerned, as long as they don’t say false things about what ID claims or about ID proponents’ motives or actions.
As I said, even if the paper was properly peer-reviewed in the publication process, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be retracted after significant faults with the paper were raised by the wider scientific community.
It would only be a theocracy if the permeation of the culture by Christianity were enforced by the State, as opposed to achieved by persuasion of the people that Christian ideas and values were worth adopting. Plenty of Christians, from Anglicans through Quakers, were heavily involved in the fight to abolish slavery, but no one says that America is a theocracy because it has abolished slavery. The voluntary adoption by a society of ideas that originally came from a religion is not the same thing as the takeover of a society by a theocracy. A society could be permeated by Christian values and morals without being officially Christian.
Indeed, in early America the society was overwhelmingly Christian, even though the Constitution forbade the federal government from any entanglement with any particular religion – even Christianity. What Discovery seems to have in mind is something like the days of early America, not something like Europe in the Middle Ages, where all religion other than Christianity was abolished and state and clerical offices were frequently confounded (with bishops running secular offices, and kings sometimes investing bishops with symbols of ecclesiastical office, etc.). That might still be distasteful to some, but calling it “theocracy” is an exaggeration, and like many exaggerations clouds the mind with emotions and makes rational policy discussion difficult.
I didn’t say the Meyer paper should or shouldn’t be retracted. I said to Tim (just above) that in point of fact it was not retracted; the BSW stopped short of that action.
And, since ID folks have published many more peer-reviewed works since then, the Meyer paper is no longer of such great importance. It was a breakthrough in its day, but the general claim that ID has no peer-reviewed papers has now been many times falsified, even without the Meyer paper. Thus, opponents have had to give up on Eugenie Scott’s approach – to deny the existence of such papers – and come up with more imaginative ways of discounting them. That was my point.
I understand that could be some nuance around the term “theocracy”, and I guess there would be a sliding scale between “full-blown theocracy” and merely a “religion dominated society”. It’s not difficult to imagine though, that if Christianity-based “design theory” permeated moral and political life then religion-based laws would start to be handed down onto the public. That doesn’t mean that the state would be forcing people to be Christian or anything like that.
LOL! I love the way you just repost Sternberg’s lies as a defense of Sternberg’s lies. Here is the actual statement from Biological Society of Washington regarding Sternberg’s subterfuge
" The paper by Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” in vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239 of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was published at the discretion of the former editor, Richard v. Sternberg. Contrary to typical editorial practices, the paper was published without review by any associate editor; Sternberg handled the entire review process. The Council, which includes officers, elected councilors, and past presidents, and the associate editors would have deemed the paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings because the subject matter represents such a significant departure from the nearly purely systematic content for which this journal has been known throughout its 122-year history. For the same reason, the journal will not publish a rebuttal to the thesis of the paper, the superiority of intelligent design (ID) over evolution as an explanation of the emergence of Cambrian body-plan diversity. The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity. Accordingly, the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.
Of course none of Sternberg’s lies will hide the fact the Meyer paper was pure garbage and was soundly thrashed by the actual scientific community.
Yet you can’t name a single one with positive evidence for the intelligent design of biological life. All you do is regurgitate the DI’s empty verbiage “they’re relevant to ID” without ever telling us what is relevant about them.
Possibly so; but the Constitution is there to make sure that religious groups don’t overreach, and try to go beyond influencing how people behave to telling people how to behave. Also, the diversity of religions in the USA would guarantee that no one religion could ever gain control of the state. But people always have to be on guard about these things, I admit.
But from Discovery’s point of view, as I explained, there already is a de facto public religion – at least among the intelligentsia – of secular humanism, materialism, etc. – and it affects public policy in all kinds of ways. Religion scholars long ago abandoned the idea that “religion” always has to have something to do with God or gods; “religion” in the broadest sense pertains to ultimate commitments, world view, and so on. A pure Marxist doesn’t believe in God, but his world view is decidedly religious, a sort of secularization and perversion of the ideas of St. Augustine. So from Discovery’s point of view, the choice is not between a religion-free society and a society dominated by Christianity or other traditional faith. The choice is not whether society will be permeated by religious values, attitudes, etc., but which religious values, attitudes etc. will prevail. They see themselves as having every right to make their “pitch” for the kind of religion they deem most true to reality, healthiest for the social order, etc. Of course Americans may choose to reject the pitch; that’s democracy. But I’m not offended by a society in which the Discovery Institute can challenge the secular religions put forward by Barbara Forrest, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, etc. I think societal debates over world views are healthy, as long as they aren’t accompanied by guns, bombs, jail sentences for dissidents, etc.
There are good scientists who also put forward junk science at times. What really matters, as far as the research focused scientific community is concerned, is productivity. In fact, a person who holds controversial views but is securing funding and producing peer reviewed papers is preferred over someone who agrees with the consensus but isn’t bringing in funding nor publishing papers. Science, at least on the research side, is very focused on results.