Dembski on Davis

William Dembski has a post about Derek Davis, director of the Dawson Institute for Church-State Studies at Baylor, and the comment he made in the NY Times the other day. I highlighted the same comment in a post on Sunday and pointed out the same thing, that Davis had taken a stand in favor of the constitutionality of teaching creationism in science classes back in 1999. Here is his comment in the Times on Sunday:

Derek Davis, director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor, said: "I teach at the largest Baptist university in the world. I'm a religious person. And my basic perspective is intelligent design doesn't belong in science class."

Mr. Davis noted that the advocates of intelligent design claim they are not talking about God or religion. "But they are, and everybody knows they are," Mr. Davis said. "I just think we ought to quit playing games. It's a religious worldview that's being advanced."

And here is his statement in a 1999 article:

n short, creationism can be presented in public school settings, provided it is presented objectively and not as truth, thus eliminating religious purpose. What is required is pedagogical neutrality. Many public schools offer outstanding courses in anthropology, comparative religion, history, literature, and philosophy in which religious ideas, including creationist accounts of the origin of life, are presented legally. Traditionally, most schools avoid presenting creationism in science classes because the courts have said that religion is not science. But there is no reason that a science class, like a history, anthropology, comparative religion, or literature class, cannot address subjects interrelated to its discipline, creationism among them. Such is the nature of interdisciplinary education. If science teachers, acting either with or without a mandate from legislatures or school boards, objectively, neutrally, and fairly present creationism without seeking to achieve a religious purpose but as an alternative explanation to life's origin and development, the presentation should not only satisfy constitutional restraints but might also help to diffuse the creationism-evolution controversy that has raged since the Scopes trial of 1925.

I, too, am curious about reconciling the two statements. It's possible to do so, I suppose. The 1999 article was on the narrower question of whether it's constitutional to teach about creationism in science classes, and he was talking about more traditional creationism, not specifically ID creationism. The statement in the times was about ID specifically, and was about whether he thought it should be taught, not about whether it's constitutional to teach it. So the two statements might be consistent in that way. It's also possible that he thinks that straight creationism has more of a place in science classrooms than ID does because straight creationism at least makes testable statements and risky predictions, whereas ID does not. Lastly, it's possible that he simply changed his mind in the last 6 years.

What I find amusing, though, is that Dembski - of all people - is highlighting inconsistency in the words of someone else. And it's doubly amusing because his own rampant duplicity in this regard feeds into the second part of Davis' statement to the Times, which is that ID advocates should stop pretending that ID is not religious and isn't speaking about God and just come clean about it. Dembski, predictably, didn't address that part of Davis' statement. If he had, it would only have shined the light even brighter on his own inconsistency in that regard.

For a perfect example, look at this post quoting Dembski from last week saying that the intelligent designer "need only be a being capable of arranging finite material objects to display certain patterns" and need not be "transcendant", and quoting Dembski from several years ago saying that the evidence of design shows "transcendent design, not reducible to the physical world. Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life." Dembski is the last person on earth who should be pointing out inconsistencies in the words of others, especially on this subject.