academic freedom

This film is Part 2 of the full episode featuring Stephen Meyer and Michael Ruse on PBS’s ThinkTank in 2006, hosted by Ben Wattenberg. Used with permission. See part 1 here.

Dr. Stephen Meyer’s opening remarks to the Texas State Board of Education, where he testified in June 2009 in favor of keeping critical analysis of evolution in the Texas science standards. Listen in as Dr. Meyer explains some of the problems with Darwin’s theory, including the Cambrian Explosion.

Dr. Stephen Meyer on the Michael Medved show discusses two recent incidents involving the idea of academic freedom. The first is a scandal at Ball State University, in which physics professor Eric Hedin was, against university policy, censored for his interdisciplinary course Boundaries of Science. The second is the cancellation of an elective, not-for-credit Philosophy course offered at Amarillo College titled Read More ›

In an interview on the Janet Parshall program, Dr. Stephen Meyer discusses evidence from the Cambrian layer of the fossil record that upholds Charles Darwin’s expressed doubt about his evolutionary theory. Meyer also recounts the opposition faced by scientists who are willing to challenge consensus for the purpose of advancing research. One recent incident of censorship involved a scandal at Read More ›

If someone had predicted a year ago that Oxford University Press would publish a book with the subtitle Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, I might have wondered what alternate universe he was inhabiting. But Oxford did publish it, and the aftershocks among the intellectual elite have yet to abate.

The book’s author, philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a professor at New York University and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate from Oxford University; fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities; and elections to such august bodies as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. It is a testament to Professor Nagel’s stature that his critique of Darwinian theory was allowed to be published at all. But his stature has not immunized him from a flood of abuse and even suggestions of creeping senility.

It’s not often that a book by a professional philosopher attracts the notice — let alone the ire — of the cultural powers-that-be. One can think of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in the 1980s, but other examples are hard to come by. At any rate, Mind and Cosmos is well on its way to becoming a book that can’t be ignored by the thinking public. Thus far, it has been denounced in the Nation and the Huffington Post, dubbed the “most despised science book of 2012” by the London Guardian, defended in the New Republic (where Nagel’s critics were blasted as “Darwinist dittoheads” and a “mob of materialists”), subjected to a feature story in the New York Times, and put on the cover of the Weekly Standard, which depicted Nagel being burned alive, surrounded by a cabal of demonic-looking men in hoods.

The author has attracted special displeasure from the powers-that-be for using Mind and Cosmos to praise intelligent design proponents such as biochemist Michael Behe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer. As the New York Times explained, many of Nagel’s fellow academics view him unfavorably “not just for the specifics of his arguments but also for what they see as a dangerous sympathy for intelligent design.” Now there is a revealing comment: academics, typically blasé about everything from justifications of infanticide to pedophilia, have concluded that it is “dangerous” to give a hearing to scholars who think nature displays evidence of intelligent design.