Sunday, July 22, 2007
That Jeff Jacoby, he's so tricky:
Not many modern universities are prepared to employ a science professor who espouses not merely "intelligent design" but out-and-out divine creation. This applicant's writings on astronomy, for example, include these thoughts on the solar system: "This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and domination of an intelligent and powerful Being . . . He governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done."
Hire somebody with such views to teach physics? At a Baptist junior college deep in the Bible Belt, maybe, but the faculty would erupt if you tried it just about anywhere else. Many of them would echo Oxford's Richard Dawkins, the prominent evolutionary biologist, who writes in "The God Delusion" that he is "hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. . . . It subverts science and saps the intellect."...
Yet Cambridge hired this guy? Hmmmm...
Richard Dawkins and other contempory scienitists tend to insist that all scientific explanations must have a naturalistic basis; that anything else is mere superstition or mythological. Isaac Newton and other scientists of his day had no problem accepting a supernatural beginning or a Creator who made an orderly, fine-tuned, predictable uiverse. Jacoby went right to the heart of the debates on origins.