Category: Culture
ACLU Lawyer and ScienceBloggers Make Off-Base Arguments Against Coppedge Case
A law professor from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles (who was previously elected head of the Southern California ACLU) was quoted in an article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune commenting on the David Coppedge’s lawsuit against Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL): “a case like his probably won’t have a shot in court, because courts have viewed intelligent design as a religious belief, rather than a scientific theory, according to Gary Williams, a professor at Loyola Law School.” This raises the question… Does it Matter to the Case Whether Intelligent Design is Religion? First, whether courts have or have not “viewed intelligent design as a religious belief” is irrelevant to Coppedge’s lawsuit. What matters is that, as the Coppedge v. Read More ›
Do the JPL Supervisors Who Demoted Coppedge Know Who Appears in The Privileged Planet?
The current travails of David Coppedge at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory hit close to home. He’s being unjustly, perversely punished simply for lending copies of two ID documentaries, Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet, the latter based on the book by Guillermo Gonzalez and yours truly. Guillermo, of course, suffered similar bigotry at Iowa State a few years ago, and endured (among other things) a barely disguised campaign to deny him tenure led by, among other people, an atheist professor of religion at Iowa State. It’s hard even to figure out what David Coppedge is supposed to have done wrong. There were no complaints against him by people to whom he had lent these documentaries. He wasn’t Read More ›
Mainstream Media Now Picking up on Intelligent Design Discrimination Lawsuit Against NASA’s JPL
Last week we reported on a discrimination lawsuit filed on behalf of JPL employee David Coppedge. Over the weekend the San Gabriel Valley Tribune ran a lengthy story reporting on the suit. After Coppedge discussed intelligent design with JPL scientists, his supervisors told him to stop discussing religion. Last April Coppedge’s bosses demoted him. Coppedge had been a leader on the system administrator team for the Cassini mission, according to the suit. The paper also reports that after being ordered by his superiors at JPL to stop talking about intelligent design, Coppedge did just that. Even more interesting is this: Earlier this month Coppedge claims he met with his supervisors, who told him that the written warning was inappropriate and Read More ›
Responding to “Thomist” Critics of Intelligent Design
Preliminary Matters I’m currently editing a volume called God and Evolution that deals with the general subject of theistic evolution (to be released by Discovery Institute this fall), and I am contributing a couple of chapters to the volume on Catholicism and ID. I’m also working on a book-length treatment of the same subject. As a result, over the last six months, I’ve been studying the relationship between Catholic theology and contemporary arguments for intelligent design. Various “Catholic” assessments of ID have been appearing on for years, and no doubt will continue to do so. (See this 2007 article from the New Oxford Review, for instance.) But recently, a certain “meme” has begun to emerge that ID is somehow un-Catholic, Read More ›
JPL Discrimination Lawsuit Latest in Long String of Free-Speech on Evolution Controversies
Former Jet Propulsion Laboratory Team Lead, David Coppedge’s case is only the most recent of a series of similar free-speech controversies, including: