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Why Bill Dembski took aim against the Darwin frauds and their enablers #1

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Over at The Best Schools, James Barham interviews design theorist Bill Dembski – who founded this blog – about why he decided to take aim at the Darwin frauds and their “Christian” enablers. Turns out it was a long, slow burn. And not what your local enabler would tell you to expect either.

Early years

When our family returned to the U.S. in 1967 [after his dad’s studies in Germany], the country was a very different place. The University of Illinois, though having encouraged my dad to get a PhD, did not hire him back—by “unfortunate coincidence,” as they put it, his job had gone to a young Ph.D. from Harvard. So my dad taught for the City Colleges of Chicago. The campus where he taught had a lot of racial tension, with faculty getting mugged and even killed. Martin Luther King was assassinated during that time. The Black Panthers, with their berets and 50-caliber bullets around their necks, disrupted faculty meetings and forced the school president to resign. When my dad didn’t return home at the expected hour, I recall my mother comforting me with the thought that if he got killed, at least I still had her. I remember the race riots and seeing Madison Avenue burning from our high-rise apartment.

With my dad teaching for the City Colleges of Chicago, I saw first-hand the dark side of academic politics, the self-servingness of teacher unions, and the decay of learning standards. I also saw my dad’s love for teaching and research die. It gave me a bad taste for aspects of the academy and probably more than anything contributed to my unwillingness to sacrifice intellectual work to academic fashion (for which I’ve paid a cost).

Despite my ambivalence toward the academy, it’s always been front and center in my life. I always felt most at home in the world of abstractions and ideas. And I always did well in the academy (until I fell afoul of it for questioning Darwinism). A life of scholarship, teaching, and writing therefore seemed to me inevitable from the start. How it’s all played out has proved less inevitable.

More.

See also: Why Bill Dembski took aim against the Darwin frauds and their enablers Part 2

Comments
The American university -- in the name of freethinking, tolerance and diversity -- has become the most close-minded, intolerant, and anti-diversity institution in the nation. http://www.indoctrinate-u.com/pages/welcome.htmlGilDodgen
January 15, 2012
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As I read the interview with Dr. Dembski, the verses in the Bible about being hated, and persecuted, for being a Christian were in the back of my mind, even though Dr. Dembski was hated, and persecuted, for simply speaking the truth about the sheer impossibilities of Darwinism, not for openly evangelizing the necessity we each have for Christ:
John 15: 18-19 “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.
Music:
Brooke Fraser - CS Lewis Song (New, Cool, video interpretation of the song) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT-sso5AhmA
bornagain77
January 15, 2012
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