Tuesday, January 10, 2006

ID and the Discovery Institute: Lying for God.


In the aftermath of the Dover "Intelligent Design" trial in which some of the defendants flat-out lied about, well, damned near everything, I guess it's not surprising to find proponents of ID still lying.

Witness this piece in USA Today from last month by the Discovery Institute's John G. West, in which West writes:

At George Mason University, a biology professor lost her job after she mentioned intelligent design in class.

Did she? Did she really? Let's go to the videotape, shall we?

Caroline Crocker says that she hadn't meant to start a controversy when she mentioned intelligent design while teaching her second-year cell-biology course at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, last semester. But many of her colleagues say that the soft-spoken molecular biologist, who received a PhD in immunopharmacology from the University of Southampton, UK, has gone too far. Sitting in an empty teaching lab, Crocker tells how she has been barred by her department from teaching both evolution and intelligent design.

Well, how about that? She wasn't fired at all. She was just told she couldn't teach ID as part of her course anymore.

And the lying continues.

AFTERTHOUGHT: There's an interesting bit further down in that Nature article:

... William Dembski, a mathematician at Baylor University in Texas and another prominent intelligent-design researcher, says that he is no longer allowed to teach on campus. "Essentially I've had about a five-year sabbatical," he complains.

"Complains?" "Complains?" If I'm reading this correctly, he's still a member of faculty and therefore still drawing a salary, but he doesn't have to do any teaching. Man, that sounds like the life, doesn't it?

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