If you fail at everything else in life, you could always try to work for a scientific organization, reveal that you're a creationist, and then land a job as a professor at Liberty University. That's just what Nathaniel Abraham did, and now he's suing the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute because as they didn't want a creationist working on a project that directly involved evolutionary concepts. PZ already covered this story when it initially came out, but now it seems to have emerged in wider media circles (it was on the Yahoo! front page when I logged on a few minutes ago). The Boston Globe article about the suit, however, provides details essential to understanding this issue, primarily that you can't work on a project that directly involves understanding evolution if you do not accept it as a fact (and a fact that is essential to biology, at that). Not everyone can do what young earth creationist Marcus Ross did or follow in the footsteps of Kurt Wise, essentially going through the motions during the process to get their doctorates and then using their degrees to buy them credibility among those already sympathetic to creationism. Perhaps creationists do not realize it, but I see something fundamentally wrong with playing pretend during the course of scientific research, not truly being committed to what it being studied (and in the case of Abraham, refusing to contribute anything about evolution to the peer-reviewed research that was supposed to result from the work in the lab).
What it appears that Abraham is trying to do, however, is say that his theological beliefs are legitimate within the scientific realm when they are not, believing that the requirement that researchers on the project have a strong grasp of evolutionary theory to be discriminatory against his religion. No one is stopping Abraham from believing in the deity of his choice, but there's no reason why anyone should bring those beliefs into the lab with them and claim that what is taken on faith should be regarded as scientific reality. I'm sure that the producers of Expelled would love to get this one in their film, this case coming close on the heels of accusations that Iowa State University unjustly denied a Guillermo Gonzalez tenure over his endorsement of intelligent design creationism, although the firing of Chris Comer for merely forwarding an e-mail about an anti-creationism lecture has also been in the news. It is awfully strange that creationists are making such a legal push to try and get their beliefs established when they claim to stand for "good science," though, their hopes likely being that evolution is outlawed or ignored like it was in the United States after the Scopes "Monkey Trial." In essence, they're trying to shove their beliefs down the throats of students rather than actually producing any scientific research or engaging in more productive debate about this shadowy "mass of evidence" they claim to have, yet anti-scientific theology continues to be popular in a country where many religious people feel that America must be "reclaimed for Christ." Still, I am not telling anyone here anything that they do not already know, and I expect that various lawsuits and attempts to sneak creationism into schools will continue for some time to come.
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What Nathaniel fails to remember is that he was fired for failing to /do/ the job he was hired to do, not because of his Creationist views. If you're signing up for a job that requires you to acknowledge and work with evolution and you fail to do that, you're going to get fired. He states, over and over, that he was "fired for dismissing evolution" but if he didn't *lie* about believing in evolution to get the job in the first place, then how did he get a job conducting research on something he doesn't believe in? Pardon the pun, but something sounds just too fishy.
Now he's going to get laughed out of court for bringing to suit a case that has nothing to do with why he was let go.
This is quite a paradoxical situation. Yet it brings up an important issue facing many creationists who sincerely desire to become serious scientists. I think the primary reason creation scientists have no credibility among mainstream scientists is the lack of credentials from universities involved in cutting-edge research. They are desperately looking for truly scientific arguments against evolution which can only be accomplished by definitive research. Yet how can they attend such institutions and have opportunities to do the research they want to do if they must believe something that goes against their worldview? If evolutionary scientists are so confident in the truth of their theory, why can't they do a better job of persuading creationists to give up their wrong ideas? It seems to me that they are essentially prevented from achieving the education that would allow them to make an informed decision. A related issue is the ability to question evolutionary theory. If I'm not mistaken, scientific theories must be falsifiable in order to qualify as truly scientific. But if people doing research on evolution are only looking for supporting evidence and never search for weaknesses in the theory, they have created an unfalsifiable system. Why can't we allow educated creation scientists to do high quality research which attempts to find these weaknesses? In the end, if evolution really is true then their research will find nothing, they will probably be more inclined to accept evolution.
Strangly I agree with Douglas. Why not let them prove themselves wrong...