From Michael Egnor at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Commenting on proposed state laws to protect scientists from discrimination, University of Chicago biology professor Jerry Coyne sums up the Darwinist approach to academic freedom:

“… I abhor discrimination against hiring simply because of someone’s religion, but adherence to ID (which, after all, claims to be a nonreligious theory) should be absolute grounds for not hiring a science professor.” (emphasis mine)

Actually, Coyne has no problem with discrimination against a scientist because of religious belief. Coyne took strong exception to NIH director Francis Collins’ public discussion of his Christian beliefs:

Collins gets away with this kind of stuff [i.e. publicly stating that science is compatible with belief in God] only because, in America, Christianity is a socially sanctioned superstition. He’s the chief government scientist, but he won’t stop conflating science and faith. He had his chance, and he blew it. He should step down.

[…]Coyne has failed to provide a shred of evidence that adherence to ID is associated in any way with bad science. How many of the scientists who have signed the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” — all of whom, according to Coyne, should be unemployable in science — practice bad science in any measurable way? Where is Coyne’s objective evidence that these scientists who support ID are substandard scientists, let alone so substandard that not a single one of them should be employed in science?

Yet Coyne insists that scientists — not just evolutionary biologists but any scientists — be banned from employment merely for affirming the evidence for design in nature.

Coyne provides no evidence that adherence to ID is associated with substandard science. He makes no argument at all for discriminating against scientists who recognize design in nature. He merely asserts that such scientists (mostly scientists who don’t share his atheist metaphysics) must not be allowed to work as scientists.

For Coyne, and for his atheist comrades who exert disproportionate influence in the scientific profession, actual evidence of scientific skill or accomplishment are of less importance in hiring a scientist than whether the scientist passes the materialist/atheist litmus test. An atheist who is an utterly undistinguished biologist can gain international renown as a defender of science, whereas a superbly accomplished astrophysicist is denied employment because he has expressed doubts about the adequacy of Darwinism to explain all aspects of living things and has expressed a willngness to take ID seriously.

Jerry Coyne’s inquisition is a small part of a fervent crusade on the part of (mostly atheist) scientists to eliminate scientists who acknowledge design in nature from the scientific profession. But most of this science is paid for by taxpayers, who ultimately decide whether or not such discrimination is acceptable in science.

Coyne’s explicit metaphysical litmus test is clear evidence that we need legislation to protect academic freedom for scientists.

This is another case where the close-minded inquisitors can be promoted higher in the academy based on their ideological purity, while the really brilliant scientists are burned at the stake as heretics.