In 2000, William Dembski tried to bring an institute called the Polanyi Center to Baylor, to promote intelligent design.
The science faculty battled the effort and it went into the local paper.
Eventually Dembski believed he had the upper hand and sent an email around campus that resulted in him having to leave campus.All this is in the Baylor archive.
I wanted to ask Dembski this week if he would be willing to try to participate in the mending of these relationships to be a good role model for students about how Christians treat each other.
I don’t know Dr. Dembski personally or what he may be open to, so this is less about him in particular and more about these situations generally.
Rightly or wrongly, many Christians - and particularly those in creationist or ID movements - percieve themselves to be in a kind of exile status. They’ve lost the culture war and they know it. And probably even take pride in that fact, reassuring themselves that if they had cultural approval, then it would be a sign of their own wickedness or compromised status. There is something sweet about being able to claim a persecuted minority identity - something that one political side has oft accused the other political side of cultivating, and yet … have themselves adopted an attitude of “if you can’t beat it, join it”. (Not meaning that they suddenly have sympathies with other persecuted groups, but meaning they feel they now have their own firm claim on persecuted minority status. In some specific settings (perhaps like Baylor), it sounds like Dembski’s definitely a largely not-welcome minority. Now - is it in the same way that flat-earthers must necessarily be a minority? Or is it an unfair persecution of religious views minority? Given that it’s Baylor we’re speaking about, the latter is a tough sell.
But all this is to say, that while a person has the (legitimate or not) perception of being a persecuted minority there, I doubt they would respond positively to a query about how they should be treating their enemies. They would imagine that this is like pressing Jesus to see if he’s treating his enemies fairly while he’s being nailed to the cross. Or at least so the comparison would sweetly run in their own imaginations. They would be quick to point out that these questions are more appropriately directed to the ones weilding the hammers.