Thoughts in a Haystack

Willaim Dembski and the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division are over at the Baptist Press feeding the Righteous Right's cultural paranoia with breathless tales of how even sectarian universities like Baylor have been taken over by Darwinists in a reverse Wedge Strategy.

The tale of the shutdown of Robert Marks' website hosted on Baylor's computers is told well enough by the article, keeping in mind that it is all coming from the IDeologists' side, since the administration is not talking so far. While the administration appears to have been ham-fisted, it's true enough that it has no duty to host a site that is not actually affiliated with the university and that brings, in its judgment, the academic standards of the school into question.

In any event, what Dembski had to say is what interests me:

Dembski, in comments to the Southern Baptist Texan newsjournal Sept. 4, underscored the hypersensitivity surrounding Intelligent Design in scholastic institutions these days.

"You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past," he said. "To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel."

Huh? If ID is science and only science, this is, at most, a bit of rough-and-tumble in the grand ol' tradition of the science wars of the 1970s and 80s, where torpedoing a web page (if any had existed back then) would have been considered small potatoes. So what's this "offense of the Gospel" and why does that apply to the "science" of ID? Just as strange, however, is:

Intelligent Design "in a sense became a poster child" of what immediate past president Robert Sloan tried to accomplish at Baylor, seeking to rescue the Baptist General Convention of Texas-affiliated school from its slide into secularization before he resigned under pressure in 2005, Dembski noted.

ID is the "poster child" of anti-secularization? Why ... that would make it ... gasp! ... sectarian!

You'd think that lying to pretend that it isn't would be an offense of the Gospel, now wouldn't you?
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