ID is quietly advancing in the mother state of one-fourth of the American Presidents. I do not know if the advance of ID in Virginia means anything to Richard Dawkins, but 4 of his 17 scheduled stops in his God Delusion world-wide book tour will be in the Virginia/DC area! Coincidence?
Unlike Kansas, the ID battles in Virginia are not in the school boards but in the colleges, communities, newspapers, and blogsphere. Both sides of the debate seem content with leaving Virginia slightly above Kansas with a D- in the Fordham Foundation public school rating for Darwinism. So there is really no public school fight in Virginia over Darwinism. The real battle is at the university level and could be an important one for ID, imho, especially in a post-Dover world. Will we see endowed pro-ID university chairs in Virginia in the future? We’ll see….
In the face of the rising ID sympathies in Virginia, Darwinists are resorting to less-than-ethical measures to enforce their pseudo-scientific dogma. They recently managed to dismiss Dr. Caroline Crocker, a pro-ID professor of cellular biology, from George Mason. Crocker actually held dual teaching positions at George Mason and Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC). However, during a public talk yesterday, she revealed Darwinists have now managed to pressure her out of a teaching position at NVCC as well. They did so in spite of stellar student evaluations of Crocker.
Caroline Crocker announced her departure from NVCC in a talk delivered at a community meeting at McLean Bible Church (MBC) in Virginia yesterday, September 24, 2006.
The church she spoke at, MBC, is an influential mega church that meets in a colossal 80 million dollar church campus financed by many of the parishioners who work in the high-tech industry of Fairfax Virginia, the internet capital of the world. MBC is headed by a Johns Hopkins PhD and messianic Jew by the name of Lon Solomon who is fiercely pro-ID. The church campus is colossal, with multiple sanctuaries and auditoriums, an indoor mini-mall (where Starbucks coffee is sold), classrooms, and offices. MBC’s support of ID is not as big a news item as the Pope’s support of ID, but in the Northern Virginia area, MBC’s support is important.
This influential church is becoming a focal point for advancing ID into the Northern Virginia/DC/Maryland Metro area. Crocker’s talk was a pre-cursor to a host of pro-ID speakers in November at MBC:
Michael Behe
Paul Nelson
Guillermo Gonzalez
Bruce Gordon
JP Moreland
William Lane Craig
I met some students for the first time at MBC this week. One was a summa cum laude bio alum from George Mason. Another was a freshman bio student at NVCC. Both accept ID and think Darwinism is garbage. I also met a chairman of a physics department at a prestigious school who accepts ID as well as many of his colleagues. These encounters are consistent with my hypothesis that as many as 1/3 of today’s biology freshman in college are sympathetic to ID and are often supported by ID-sympathetic faculty.
The area surrounding MBC is home to NIH, Johns Hopkins, NASA, numerous bio-tech and engineering firms, and numerous high-tech aerospace and defense contractors encircling the nation’s capital. This is the highest per-capita concentration of technology talent in the world, and a large percentage are sympathetic to ID. I meet a pro-ID NIHers all the time. Given this, I don’t think it will be too long before an ID-friendly organization will form in the area to focus the area’s intellectual and financial resources toward further exploration of ID.
I commented before that imho it is fruitless to try to persuade die-hard Darwinists sitting on the peer-review committees and school boards. Time and energy are better focused on the next generation of scientists who can be reached through channels outside of government-approved Darwinist indoctrination camps (otherwise known as public schools). And this outreach is happening in Virginia.
PS
Links to a TV program describing Crocker’s ordeal at GMU can be accessed through Crocker and Sisson’s TV appearance. A report of her teaching at NVCC can be accessed through : An insurgency that aims to topple Darwin