Leave The Money On The Night-Stand: Intelligent Design Pimps Genesis Again

William Dembski: Yes I do. No I don't. Let me clarify. Recipe for making a shambles of your academic career: Take one inflexible stand.  Mix with one pinch integrity and six tablespoons religious fervor.  Overheat.  Bring to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  Recant.  Repeat.

Bill Dembski was at Baylor when I found myself there.  At the time he was guiding a sort of Intelligent Design kiosk called the Michael Polyani Center, and wound up in all sorts of conflict with the faculty for the best of reasons: they thought his ideas were awful.  (Well, and they were also annoyed that he was under the academic protection of the President of the University and so immune from that critique.)

According to Lori Lebo at religiondispatches.org, Dembski was brought in for the lightbulb and cigar smoke treatment that (in my experience anyway) is the Baptist substitute for the Spanish Inquisition.

Briefly, Lebo reports that:

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In explaining his position on the age of the earth on the blog Uncommon Descent, Dembski wrote in the comment thread, “As I note in THE END OF CHRISTIANITY, I would be a young-earth creationist in a heartbeat if I didn’t see the evidence for an old earth as so strong. The young-earth old-earth debate, however, is only about 20 percent of the book. Most of it will be of interest to Christians of either stripe and even to theistic evolutionists.” So, his point is that even though one fifth of the book is devoted to the evidence against a literal interpretation of the Bible, fundamentalist Christians will still find it interesting. 

[snip]

However, according an article this week in Florida Baptist Witness (hat tip to Jack Krebs at The Panda’s Thumb), when Southwestern Seminary [sic] president Paige Patterson, Dembski’s boss, learned of Dembski’s statements, he called him into a meeting with other high-ranking officials.

According to the Baptist Witness:

At that meeting, Dembski was quick to admit that he was wrong about the flood, Patterson said. “Had I had any inkling that Dr. Dembski was actually denying the absolute trustworthiness of the Bible, then that would have, of course, ended his relationship with the school,” he said.

In response to the meeting, Dembski backtracked mightily and wrote what he referred to as a clarification in “A Reply to Tom Nettle’s Review of Dembski’s End of Christianity” (see page 8), in which he explains what he would have done differently had he written the book today.

In writing The End of Christianity today, I would also underscore three points: (1) As a biblical inerrantist, I accept the full verbal inspiration of the Bible and the conventional authorship of the books of the Bible. Thus, in particular, I accept Mosaic authorship of Genesis (and of the Pentateuch) and reject the Documentary Hypothesis. (2) Even though I introduce in the book a distinction between kairos (God’s time) and chronos (the world’s time), the two are not mutually exclusive. In particular, I accept that the events described in Genesis 1-11 happened in ordinary space-time, and thus that these chapters are as historical as the rest of the Pentateuch. (3) I believe that Adam and Eve were real people, that as the initial pair of humans they were the progenitors of the whole human race, that they were specially created by God, and thus that they were not the result of an evolutionary process from primate or hominid ancestors.  He also reconsiders his position on the Great Flood...

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Putting this in perspective, Dembski's employment at SBTS depends on his compliance with fundamentalist dogma, even if that dogma conflicts with the facts on the ground.

Let's make that really, really clear: dogma trumps fact.  Not for evolutionists.  For proponents of Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creationism.  Whoops.  So much for the canard that Intelligent Design proponents are losing jobs over their intellectual integrity.  Well, okay, they are, but mainly at SBTS.

And Dembski, instead of taking the courageous stand he might have taken, folded like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' defensive front.

Genesis 1-11...?  It's all true, he bleats now.  Even if it's not.  Kairos and chronos overlap in this new improved Dembski-ism.  (Then why bother making the distinction in the damned book?)  It's all history.

So much for fact.

Once again, those who would do Genesis the biggest favors wind up pimping her out like a cheap whore.

No wonder nobody finds the romance in her anymore.

Comments

[Touchstone]

Yeah. As someone who has followed Dembski now for 10 years or more, as the "Newton of Information" the intellectual leader of the Intelligent Design movement, this kind of reaction is predictable. If you watch him speak to church groups on YouTube vs. watching him debate real scientists or do adversarial radio interviews, you wouldn't think it was the same guy. He's as proudly and impudently creationist when he's selling his books or preaching politics at the local Presbyterian, then he's disdainful and snobbish about the very same creationism and religious dogma he earlier espoused when he has to tangle with people who know science, math, philosophy.

This is one reason there's no love lost between Answers in Genesis and Bill Dembski. It ain't because Dembski really has a problem with AiG, it's that AiG knows they will be disowned and denigrated whenever it's good for Bill Dembski poilitically to do so.

So now he gets called on the carpet. And so he goes into "Baptist mode". But wait a few weeks, he'll be back "Doctor Doctor" mode, no problem. He knows that the pious masses really won't check up on him. He's genuflected properly to defuse the criticism, and will carry on as per usual.

-TS