Professor denied tenure because of Intelligent Design beliefs
Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez is an assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State University (ISU). Born in Havana, he and his family fled from Cuba to the United States in 1967, where he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy with honors from the University of Washington in 1993.
Several of his colleagues have concluded that in 2007 Gonzalez was denied tenure at ISU as a result of his support for intelligent design. Tenure denial often means the kiss of death in academia, making it very difficult to find an academic position elsewhere. Although the story was first broken publicly in the Iowa paper, Ames Tribune, on May 12, 2007, the actual decision took place earlier in the spring (Dillon, 2007).
Dr. Gonzalez had just bought a house, married a local woman, and wanted to start a family and continue his very promising career as an astronomer at ISU. He tends to keep to himself, focusing on his highly productive research program, which would continue if he were allowed to stay at the university. His supporters have argued that this is what ISU does not want, because of his alleged scientific heresy.
According to ISU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, the tenure process, as outlined on page 4 of its Procedures and Promotion and Tenure Policy and Procedure, requires “excellence sufficient to lead
to a national or international reputation …[that] would ordinarily be shown by the publication of approximately fifteen papers of good quality in refereed journals.” Having produced 68 refereed scientific papers, Dr. Gonzalez has exceeded by more than 350 percent his own department’s standard
for “excellence” requirement for tenure. ISU considered 66 faculty for tenure during the past academic year, and only Gonzalez and two others were denied tenure (Dillon, 2007)….
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4 Responses to Professor denied tenure because of Intelligent Design beliefs
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This case was also documented in the film “Expelled”. It is not surprising, given the composition of the department. Tenure is not, and will not be an objective process — one key aspect is whether your fellow faculty want you as a permanent part of their department. If they don’t, then all the publications and grants mean precisely nothing.
The AAUP (professors proto-union) defines academic freedom very carefully, and specifically EXCLUDES protection of religious views. This is again due to the type of faculty that dominate that organization.
Unfortunately for Professor Gonzalez, the same forces that drove his lack of tenure will also drive a lack of grant funding and negative publication reviews. It is a well-planned spiral.
a more recent example of this is (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/19kentucky.html)
I hope so!
This comment alone sums up the total “reprobate” “intelligence” atheists are impeded by: “Nature magazine’s Adam Rutherford (2007) wrote … 13 billion years ago … “God made it” is not falsifiable and therefore not science.” Well, Adam Rutherford, just because it hasn’t ever, in the history of humanity and it’s total summary intellectual capacity, been overturned does not make it non-falsifiable. Actually, that makes it a law.
The sad fact is that the statement “God made it”, actually is quite testable and falsifiable — BECAUSE SCIENCE HAS BEEN TESTING ALTERNATE HYPOTHESIS FOR THE LAST 150 YEARS!!!! There is not one shred of evidence or knowledge of origins of any other known cause –outside of the hypothesis that God did it. As a matter of fact, nothing in the universe makes sense without that hypothesis!! There is NO SCIENCE that can demonstrate that there is any other cause, or even the possibility of any other cause (overturning Newton’s third law) outside of God. The only thing that physics can do is offer more non-science–purely mathematical contrivances that are untestable and unknowable (anecdotal and ad hoc)– like attempting to derive the powers of superman and wonder woman! However, knowledge of the experiment sonoluminescence gives us predictable science and tells us the completely compatible origins of measurable light in the form of photons, and that is from acoustics! Interestingly, this is the scientific test of Genesis 1:2-4. That from a preexisting fluid, the addition of acoustic waves can produce photons (light). Concurrently, the CMB is a widely accepted photograph of the “beginning” and it is now widely excepted that it is absolutely necessary for acoustic wave perturbations to necessarily cause the variances in the CMB. You can read my article under ‘cosmology’ on this site for more info or check my website which has 5 hours of lectures that show the underlying nature of acoustics. Alternately, it is widely accepted that there are HUGE discrepancies in any hypothesis outside of “God did it” that include problems deriving ages, speciation, light, time, catastrophic events and consequences, big bang models, evolution models, QM, etc etc etc. These are recorded by atheist scientists, not just ‘religious’ scientists. well, enough rambling.
The point is, we have been testing, as a global and ageless scientific community for the past 150 years (truly from the ‘beginning’) the single hypothesis: did God do it or the alternate godless, non-cause, random, spontaneous, combustion-origin of the universe do it? Non-cause randomness doesn’t work!!!! That is what the SCIENCE is telling everyone and has been shouting very loudly for a century and a half! The scientific method works just fine. But the alternate atheistic paradigm that has nearly choked the noble method to death is absolutely driving us all to madness and complete anarchy.
Let me describe it in another way — through a favorite of atheists in evolution and astronomy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geologic_Clock_with_events_and_periods.svg if you notice the dark line at the top, that is how long humans, according to atheists, have been around. And since the beginning of that time, or at least a time of ‘modern’ sentience, humans have believed and passed down in oral and written traditions –about God. As well, for the last 2000 years men have suffered the most heinous death, unable to deny their testimony of the living, resurrected, Jesus Christ as the only begotten son of God and savior of all mankind. Now, in contrast, looking at that time scale, and thinking about how short a time we have actually known God, think about how utterly minuscule that attack on God has been from atheistic science and man-derived religions. And there, my friends, you get the inglorious picture of the frailty of the limp, flaccid, intellect that would redact all history of it’s ultimate foundation: “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. What preposterous arrogance indeed of those who would be atlas and attempt to carry the weight of all that precedent on their weak, structureless shoulders!
Or in another way, watch the beginning of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU8rL44SqGg
and know this “Science is so big in atheists eyes! Yet the knowledge of God in the eyes of all humanity, from all time past to present, is the size of VY Canis Majoris. Now think back to the beginning of this response and how much science has been shown to satisfy some other hypothesis than “god did it”. Now you starting to get the picture of how feeble the atheist position is.
Anyone, who would walk on so few grains of sand attempting to maintain balance over an infinite abyss of unknowable, unenlightened, indeterminable presuppositions is clinically void of sanity.
To hell they willingly go!