Jonathan Zittrain

The New York Times has a story today about creationists who pursue PhDs in scientific fields — and write theses completely at odds with their personal beliefs as “young Earth” creationists.

The first example is Marcus Ross, a PhD student at the University of Rhode Island who wrote what his supervisors called an impeccable thesis — including discussion of dates 65 million years ago — while believing that the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old.

The article says this raises imponderable issues:

And, for some, his case raises thorny philosophical and practical questions. May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

Most of these seem pretty clear to me. Why would a secular university possibly deny a degree to someone who met the requirements because of his or her religion? Is there any university ready to say it would do so? The closest person to this view portrayed in the piece is Michael Dini, a professor of biology education at Texas Tech, who will “not write letters of recommendation for graduate study for anyone who would not offer ‘a scientific answer’ to questions about how the human species originated.” That doesn’t seem so controversial, though — if someone looking for a biology education recommendation can’t offer a scientific answer to such questions, he or she would make a poor biology teacher. Only if Prof. Dini were purporting to look into the student’s actual beliefs — denying a recommendation to someone who can answer the question very well, but who additionally believes that the Earth was formed only 10,000 years ago — would that seem to raise a problem.

Another objection raised by the article is that creationists might use their academic credentials to buttress scientific theories of creationism:

But [Ross] has also written and spoken on scientific subjects, and with a creationist bent. While still a graduate student, he appeared on a DVD arguing that intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, is a better explanation than evolution for the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of animal life that occurred about 500 million years ago.

Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists.

This doesn’t seem so persuasive. If he has the credential, he has the credential. Yes, it may be intellectually dishonest to lend one’s credential (and accompanying scientific experience) to a set of claims that are not scientifically sound, especially if one is claiming that they are (rather than just believed religiously). But that seems impossible to predict at the stage of admitting someone to study for a degree — and policing ought to be left to one’s conscience or to the particular learned scientific societies that one joins afterwards if they ask for certain levels of intellectual integrity from their members.

Otherwise, allowing those with deeply held religious beliefs to enter into the heart of scientific study, if they are willing to adopt the tools and philosophy of the scientific method, seems a worthy exchange program. Adopt rather than believe: it’s only the former that we can really test.