You might say this is simply impossible, that in order to be competent you must believe in the empirically proven model. In this case we have no problem. By picking someone competent you by definition eliminate anyone with crazy beliefs and so there is no need to specifically discriminate on that basis.

I personally don’t think that’s true though. Physicists who are fully aware of quantum mechanics can teach classical dynamics as well as if not better than someone from a hundred years ago who really believed the classical model.

The problem you’ve encountered is in your experiment setup. If you postulate that person X is the most qualified person to do the job, but person X has beliefs that preclude actually being the most qualified person, you’ve created an insolvable conflict in your base axioms.

Precisely. Which is why the real issue is whether the qualifications needed to be a professor (physician, etc.) include public respectability in some sense.

@Richard Dawkins:

I am now curious about where this taboo comes from. Does it come from religion itself? Or does it have something to do with the ‘cultural relativist’ belief that all opinions are equally valid?

I would like to hope that it is the result of the knowledge that we all have skeletons of one sort or another in our closets, in the form of attitudes or past behaviour we’d rather our bosses didn’t find out about, but which don’t affect our present and future ability to do our jobs. And also, that we rightly fear the sort of toxic politics that arise when the best way of discrediting an opponent is to dig up some evidence of their “unrespectable” opinions…

What I take from Dawkins’ writings, as well as Sam Harris’, is that they feel that if someone believes there is an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient being who created the universe and who takes an interest in what human beings do, and if that someone wants us to treat those beliefs as credible, that person should present evidence for his beliefs. Requiring this evidence does not make them (or me!) bigots, or hateful, or bad people of any sort. I know of no claim that either Prof. Dawkins or Mr. Harris has ever hurt anyone, except maybe by hurting their feelings.

In the case above, a man was applying for a position with a scientific institution based on scientific knowledge that cannot be reconciled with the man’s stated beliefs viz. Christianity. It seems appropriate to me, as I gather it seems to Prof. Dawkins, that the institution would not entirely trust a man who claims to hold mutually contradictory beliefs.

Please read what Prof Dawkins actually writes, not some bogeyman caricature of what people who are defensive about their religions imagine him to have written. “The God Delusion” is actually a warm, funny, hopeful book.

Or until a professional astronomer decides to use his position to promote intelligent design, which is why Gaskell came up in the first place, even though he isn’t a creationist.

I deliberately discussed extreme hypothetical cases, because they raise the general issue starkly, in a way that the Gaskell case does not. The Gaskell case is complicated by the fact that he is not a YEC, so it does not bring out the general principle of whether private beliefs should be ignored. Gaskell’s private beliefs are not obviously silly, so the issue of principle is not seen in sharp focus.

So, that is why I chose to discuss preposterous examples like the eye doctor who believes in the stork theory, the astronomer who thinks the universe is less than 10,000 years old, and the YEC geologist. The demonstration that it was worthwhile raising these hypothetical extremes is precisely the fact that a substantial number of commenters on Boing Boing have come out and stated that they would STILL hire somebody even if his private beliefs were as ridiculous as these hypothetical cases.

Richard

I see the example of the new earth cosmologist not being hired somewhat of an easier that laid out. Yes such a person fraud, but more so what will they inspire in others?

A person going through the motions isn’t a good fit in that they are going to be perceived as inauthentic or generic at best.

What student (or dean of a department, or parent of a student) wants to have their future livelihood shaped by “the guy that doesn’t believe this stuff, but passes the tests really really well”

How many inquisitions, purges, and genocides does it take to show that unswerving adherence to the status quo is a bad idea for humanity? That is true even if the status quo is good, solid science. It is true because humans are fallible and science is a process and must incorporate changing theories and therefore must harbor (and even encourage) heretics. Science is hard, but making it easy by forcing adherence to the current beliefs will not make it better.

I would note that the case of the astronomer here involves his employment at an academic institution. Theoretically, a university should tolerate a wide variety of beliefs.

“…to determine that their beliefs may also be evidently false.”

I’m not sure what this means in the real world. “May evidently be false” is a very slippery slope. That Gaskell’s beliefs may evidently be false implies, by your logic, that he shouldn’t be teaching at all, regardless of his tenure status. It also implies that someone can conclusively falsify his or anyone’s religious beliefs. Would this standard be applied to all religious beliefs? It’s almost absurd to hypothesize that a Muslim astronomer at U of Kentucky would have been treated the same as Gaskell.

The story of Dr. Gaskell is much ado about nothing, IMO. He’s more a victim of PC thought control on campuses than anything else. Par for the course, unfortunately. He could have been a religious minded Political Science prof and had a similar experience.

Why Mr Dawkins jumped on this story is beyond me. I appreciate his books on evolution, but I’m not a fan of his crusade to stamp out religiosity.

There are clergy who have lost their faith and are now just doing their job – and they can still be competent at it.

Another analogy that would be in the same realm of academics, but not with the not so divisive element of religion, are paleontologist in search of soft tissue in fossils, and those thinking they are finding modern bio-matter. You might think Ms. Schweitzer is full of it, but that won’t prevent you from running her experiments as a grad student and reporting what you find.

So if the Mahayanan Middle Way says that’s not so,
(and I’m not a Buddhist, though loosely familiar with it, but find it hard to believe it references internal combustion engines in anything but the most uselessly general way — all is maya, etc.)

then either your belief system is patently ludicrous, or you have moved the debate to some other realm of meaning such that you’re not even really talking about the same thing as our anonymous car mechanic.
I.e. the gasoline has no capacity for agency, so cannot “make” the engine do anything, or “work” is a value imposed by the observer, and the engine simply “is” with or without gasoline, etc.
True, but ultimately boring when it comes to getting stuff done.

If you fixed a fuel supply issue with your bike, then you must have acknowledged some observable, testable, repeatable cause and effect relationship between the fuel system and whether the engine runs. You made observations, tested them, acted on them. You fixed your engine. This is empiricism. This is the scientific method.

How can you have done this while simultaneously asserting it wasn’t so?
There’s an inconsistency there which needs to be confronted.
It’s like saying you can catch falling things but don’t recognize the validity of gravity.

You seem to believe that only religious people are capable of violence. One would think that the history of the 20th century would teach you otherwise but I bet you’re one of those who deny that the USSR and Maoist China were driven by atheist ideology.

I know that the point is a bit abstract and people these days find abstract thinking very difficult but…. the idea here is to abstract out from the historical context the lesson that *any* intensely held belief system that “others” those who disagree is dangerous and capable of vast violence.

Yes yes I know. You drink the kool-aid and think that atheism isn’t a belief system… it’s science! Ah no, it isn’t. When you assert as true a proposition that you cannot prove true that is a belief. Atheists deny that god exists, something they cannot prove, so atheism is a belief. It is a systematic metaphysical, philosophical world view that holds concrete beliefs about the nature of reality.

Catholics aren’t a mindless hive with one thought. There are many MANY conflicting views from local church level, on up to the Bishops. You will see this when one of the Bishops says something exceedingly stupid or inflammatory.

Catholics aren’t bound to follow everything the Pope says. Most people don’t understand what “Papal infallibility” means. It doesn’t mean he can go onto Jeopardy and answer every question with, “What is I’m-a the freakin’ Pope!” and be considered right.

It is reserved for issues of doctrine only. For example: Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX, 1854, defining the Immaculate Conception and Munificentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII, 1950, defining the Assumption of Mary.

When the Pope comes on and talks about condoms, global warming, or Harry Potter, those are his views and the direction he thinks the Church should take. But it does not mean every Catholic must follow these instructions, nor that he is infallible on these subjects, nor that all of the Bishops etc agree.

Science does not make any atheistic or humanistic assumptions. It is limited to creating explanations concordant with observed and reproducible /facts/, data, results. No-one can test a diety, there’s no glaring facts that require the existence of a diety — much less the Judeo-Christian-Islamic deity – to explain.

He has publicly appropriated the authority of the Astronomy Department of UT Austin to lend credence to not merely one but a variety of Creationist views – his disclaimer of his personal belief in YEC not withstanding. It’s not science — /none/ of it. It’s all religious debate and political agenda, and has NO place in science. He /publicly/ declared the insertion of these into the public discussion of science to be his goal. Let him reap what he sowed.

Great scientists had long held absurd beliefs historically, as it was all in a primitive phase, it doesn’t diminish the quality and contributions of their work at all (depending on the field), so…

Barring the examples where both of these things happen, a pastors job is one that is about belief. If we are to believe Dawkins (and others here), belief is not in the domain of science. Science by definition operates without belief.

So yeah. Job about belief, discriminate on basis of beliefs. Job about science, beliefs shouldn’t matter – or you’re doing it wrong.

Does he ever say HOW the earth is expanding? That is the elephant-in-the-room question about his theory. (Which I recall isn’t ‘his’, it’s been around for awhile.)

That’s the core issue at stake here, and I’d say that answering “Yes” to any of those questions is pretty much the antithesis of Happy Mutant thinking.

I don’t understand.

“In short, he’s looking to justify bigotry.”

That was over the top, and I don’t appreciate it. Words have meaning.

Having what someone’s potential employers can logically show is a mental defect and hiding it from them, or claiming that it wouldn’t affect their scientific integrity in their position, is wrong. Does that statement really mean that I’m trying to justify bigotry? No, it doesn’t. Especially since mental clarity and intellectual honesty are requirements for the job.

I’ve already explained how a devout stork-believer is either mentally unfit or intellectually dishonest. If you can apply the same kind of thought experiment I used before on another, less absurd belief and again reasonably disprove it, then the same reason applies not to hire the holder of that less-absurd belief as well.

I hope everyone can see that I’m not attacking religion. Although I think it’s entirely wrong, for example, to consider a closet YEC for a position as a geologist, I personally feel that matters of faith can be extremely helpful to humankind. Yeah, shocker! :-)

As far as economists reading Marxist literature goes, when I was in grad school in the 70s, the econometrics department was dominated by Marxists, and why not? How would you expect to run a planned economy unless you understand how to measure it and plan it? I’d expect well-read economists to know Marx’s work, and that of currently influential Marxists. If somebody were trying to work in a university Literature department, I’d be concerned if they liked most Marxist writing, which belongs on the Dismal Science Fiction shelf next to Ayn Rand, but there’s no accounting for taste.