Strange things can happen in this world of science, where boundaries between scientific rigor and individual perception are constantly blurred. So, I was sitting at my desk this morning thinking about some way to skip this afternoon's meeting with my boss (an effort which as you might expect finally proved fruitless), when Tyler brought me one of this little pieces of paper every egotistic scientist loves to receive. A reprint request of one of his papers. To be honest it looked a bit a strange for a guy in the US (and not some backward country where internet access is still non-existent) to be asking for prints of two papers published in free access journals. And by surface mail no less.
That was a just hint, that there was something interesting in this request and the name of the institution ("Liberty" University of Lynchburg Virginia) made me curious to find out more about this. Soon I came up with details about his controversial founder, Jerry Lamon Falwell, pastor and tele-evangelist, the guy to whom the famous quote "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them" is attributed. It was then that I let out my first "oh no!".
I carried on with the Liberty University itself, an educational institution whose 9600 students have to pay fines for attending dances, viewing R-rated movies or drinking, should restrict intercourse with the opposite (check that! strictly the opposite) sex to holding hands and abiding by a dress code which prohibits hair covering the ears or eyebrows for guys, piercing in any place else than the ears for girls and shorts for both sexes. Being just a bit prepared I thought "hmmmm..."
But then I went on to check the Biology Department. After all that was what interested me the most since the request was coming from there. I was a bit prepared from noticing certificate programs such as "Liberty Bible Program" but when I saw the list of classes being taught, I could not say neither "oh no!" nor "hmmmmm...". Looking at courses such as "Evangelism and Christian Life" (3rd year) or "New Testament Survey" (4th year) just left me speechless. So, apart from having to miss all that constitutes college life or being obliged to remain sexually inactive until they reach the age of 22 (unless they get married before they graduate) the biology students of this institution have to read the Bible not as leisure reading but as part of the process of getting their degree...Oh, and by the way. They 'll probably be informed about something called evolution as an alternative theory to God creating everything within 7 days!
I now had serious doubts about where I was sending the reprints of my papers (which by the way were juuuuuuuust a little bit more in favour of neo-darwinian evolution against creationism and intelligent or un-intelligent design). Nonetheless I thought that dialogue and interchange of opinion is the only way for the progress of science and in this case perhaps my sending the reprints could contribute, only slightly but still contribute to this dialogue, whose outmost goal should be redefining the borderline between provable scientific hypotheses and hand-waving-argumented, emotionally-charged perceptions, that are seeking not to comfort or relieve but to oppose and infuriate. Because deep down I think that people preaching intelligent design maybe should be intelligent enough to resign...
Or then perhaps, maybe if we don't get to have this dialogue after all, maybe WE should resign from trying.
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