Did you ever have an experience like this? You meet someone seemingly unlikely yet who really gets you, who you realize has been following your work, tracking your ideas, with sympathy, intelligence, and discernment for years — only you didn’t know it. It’s like meeting an old friend but for the very first time. It is tremendously gratifying and encouraging. 

Our geologist colleague Casey Luskin had that experience the other day when he was interviewed for an hour by an extremely thoughtful, well informed, and philosophically sophisticated Muslim in the U.K., Subboor Ahmad. You can find Subboor’s YouTube channel with all his podcasts here.

It’s not just that Subboor has followed the ID controversy closely — in fact he’s had Paul Nelson and William Dembski as guests in the past — but he’s also tracked the legal aspects of the evolution debate in the United States, including the Dover trial, and he’s well aware of the larger threat to free speech in the U.S. The theme of the conversation is “Academic censorship of Darwinian critics.” Subboor points out correctly the work self-censorship does now, so that overt censorship doesn’t have to exert itself so much anymore.

Watch and take encouragement. Dr. Luskin at the end drives home the point that censorship in academic science practiced its skills on ID, but has since metastasized:

The politicization of science is only getting worse. This is not good for the ability of science to advance and correct its past mistakes. If you love science, and I personally do, and if you care about its ability to correct inaccurate information, to find truth, to overturn wrong ideas, you should be very concerned about what’s going on in science today. It’s not just the ID-evolution issue. It’s many other issues, although I think ID and evolution are where the intolerance and the politicization really started. A lot of the cancellation methods that are now being used in other scientific fields were invented and honed by working on ID proponents. They figured out how to do it on us, but now it’s spreading to other scientific fields and it’s really dangerous.