2010

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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, contrary to the Catholic intellectual tradition, or some such. This seems to me to be a serious mistake that needs to be challenged directly. So one (though only one) of the purposes of the publications I’ve been working on is to respond to a cluster of criticisms of ID by some recent Catholic critics, including those by Ed Feser, Frank Beckwith, Michael Tkacz, and Stephen Barr. Some of these criticisms have taken place online, others in printed publications.

Unfortunately, the issues at stake are subtle and complicated, and often involve translations into somewhat different “conceptual schemes”; so it’s hard to deal with them adequately in the drive-by fashion appropriate to the blogosphere. Moreover, I don’t think that these gentlemen are all making exactly the same arguments, though their criticisms are related.

So there’s a danger of over-generalizing.

Since print publications have such a long gestation period, however, and the debate seems to be creating far more heat than light, I’ve decided to weigh in more promptly. My first response, to Stephen Barr, appeared several weeks ago. I’ll offer a few more responses here at Evolution News & Views, one at a time, over the next couple of months. (See also Vincent Torley’s response to Ed Feser over at Uncommon Descent, including the discussion in the comments section. Torley has promised more along these lines in coming weeks.)

Former Jet Propulsion Laboratory Team Lead, David Coppedge’s case is only the most recent of a series of similar free-speech controversies, including:

David Coppedge has worked on the Cassini mission since 1997. In 2000 he earned recognition for excellence, receiving the important role of “Team Lead SA” (system administrator), a role he held until his demotion in 2009.

SAs oversee 200 Unix workstations, several high-capacity data storage units, networking equipment, and other specialized computing equipment across America and Europe. He has a wide breadth of knowledge about technical aspects of Cassini’s computers and networks and was heavily involved in all the mission operations. Coppedge has been a faithful and highly regarded JPL employee for many years, has led tours of the lab and has served as an outreach speaker presenting the Cassini findings to civic and astronomy clubs and school groups.

Now, though, this exemplary employee has been demoted. Why? Did he do something to jeopardize the mission? No. Was he guilty of incompetence? No. Was he lazy or just lackadaisical in his work? No. David Coppedge’s sin was a thought crime, the mere willingness to challenge the ruling authority of Darwinian evolution. In conversation he asked colleagues if they’d be interested in watching a documentary that dealt with evolution and intelligent design. For this he was harassed and discriminated against.

UPDATED 01-27-2011 It’s an outrage that JPL employee David Coppedge was harassed and discriminated against for his pro-intelligent design views, but you can help him. If you want to stand up for academic freedom, this man needs to hear from you: Get ready now to call (preferably) or at least email Charles Bolden, NASA’s administrator, to express your outrage at the fact that Coppedge was fired this week. Here’s that contact information: phone: 202-358-1010; email: charles.bolden@nasa.gov. Your voice has an impact in this debate — make sure it gets heard!

Supervisors at NASA’s prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) illegally harassed and demoted a high-level computer system administrator for expressing support of intelligent design to co-workers, according to a discrimination lawsuit filed in California Superior Court. The lawsuit was filed by attorneys on behalf of David Coppedge, an information technology specialist and system administrator on JPL’s Cassini mission to Saturn, the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever launched. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a NASA laboratory managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where robotic planetary spacecraft, such as the Mars Rovers, are built and operated. Coppedge was a “Team Lead” Systems Administrator on the Cassini mission until JPL demoted him for allegedly “pushing religion” by loaning interested co-workers DVDs supportive Read More ›

An old Monty Python sketch about a mistranslated Hungarian-to-English phrasebook made infamous the line, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” Today, evolutionary biologists are puzzled about something equally bizarre: why are eels so full of speciation? One biologist recently said on ScienceDaily, “How can you have seven species of the same fish eating the same thing and, quite literally, living under the same rock?” Under evolutionary biology, one would expect to find some mechanism–perhaps a geographic barrier like a large expanse of open ocean–responsible for the reproductive isolation that generated the new “species.” Instead, they found this: To find out the biologists looked at selected mitochondrial and nuclear genes and asked whether there were unique alleles (variants) of these genes Read More ›

Finals might be over, but there’s still one deadline looming for college and graduate students. Applications for Discovery Insitute’s 2010 Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design are due this Friday, April 16. These two intensive summer seminars on intelligent design, science, and culture run from July 9-17, 2010 in Seattle. The first seminar is for students in the natural sciences and philosophy of science; the second seminar is for students in the social sciences and humanities (including politics, law, journalism, and theology). These seminars allow students not only to learn about ID, but to become equipped to make a difference as a part of the ID movement. Leading lights from the intelligent design community such as Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, Stephen Read More ›