Is Bill Dembski Using Students as Foot Soldiers?

sbtsJoshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education looks at the syllabi for the classes Bill Dembski will be teaching this year at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary:

Master’s students and undergraduates taking Dembski’s course on “Intelligent Design” must “provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on ‘hostile’  Web sites, the posts totaling 3,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).”
As John Lynch notes, the problem “isn’t that Dembski is encouraging students to post on ‘hostile’ sites, it is that the assignment doesn’t force the students to engage with their critics in any way. Instead, all the student has to do is cut and paste some text, save the url, and pass it on to Dembski. Money in the bank.” It is also moderately worrisome that students must defend ID creationism, and cannot get credit for offering thoughtful critiques of the instructor’s ideas that are rooted in the methodologies of science or theology. Thus, they must defend a position regardless of what they know or feel the truth to be. They need not engage any responses, only recite trite nonsense and scuttle home to the safety of SWBTS. Dembski’s exam for his Christian Apologetics course is similarly vapid, eschewing critical analysis in favor of reasoning toward a predetermined conclusion.
For instance:

Philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy, who is on the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary, argues that humans do not have a soul, that soul is a Greek invention, and that the original Hebrew understanding of the human person was as a purely physical being. Thus, for her, our immortality consists not in having immortal souls but in the prospect of God resurrecting us to a new physical existence. Contra Murphy, argue that we do have a soul and that it is more than our physical bodies.

Now Nancey Murphy is a perfectly reasonable person, an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren, and a respected theologian. Students studying theology ought to be prepared to engage her arguments, and should consider the possibility that her reading of the historical record and her study of theology have led her to a true conclusion. To be compelled to reject her arguments, and (as in other questions) to unthinkingly denigrate an unnamed “liberal seminary” filled with “professors intent on eroding any real faith” in their students, is indoctrination, not teaching.

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  1. Jim says:

    I’m no defender of Dembski. Nor ID.

    But there must be some un-intelligent and misfortunate language in Dembski’s instructions to his students. Unless Dembski’s conducting a sociometric non-parametric study of his own on hostility scales made into fixed and stable traits of response to his cant.

    It’s as tragic as Buridan’s Ass that both Dembski and PZ Myers and likely Dembski’s graffiti-painting students perpetuate exceptional literary mediocrity. Give me Voltaire. I’m forcing generous inferences on this disaster by insisting it’s a mistake.

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