Slaughter of the Dissidents–Book Review

Slaughter of the DissidentsBook Review

I suppose I ought to start this review on a more positive note, but here I go anyway: If you didn’t like the movie Expelled, you are really not going to like Jerry Bergman’s Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing The Careers Of Darwin Doubters. It’s one thing to sit down in a theater for a few minutes and see a handful of stories done over lightly (by necessity of the medium) about people ejected from academia for doubting Darwin. It’s another thing to read dozens of such stories, presented in hundreds of pages of detail. It’s a shame this book wasn’t out when the movie was released in theaters; it provides the documentation that demonstrates Expelled’s case.

Chapter One, guest-authored by Kevin Wirth, tells why the book matters: it’s about discrimination against Darwin skeptics. I have argued that the word discrimination ought not be used indiscriminately; there are times when it is appropriate to discriminate, whcn it’s based on relevant factors. Wirth shows that discrimination against Darwin doubters is often based on distortions of fact, twisted descriptions of how science and religion interact, actual religious discrimination and censorship (a double violation of the First Amendment), and more.

And then Dr. Bergman begins to tell the tales. He has spent over thirty years in research on this, and there is plenty to be told. One weakness of the book is that it lacks a quick one-page overview, a simple chart showing how many people are included in the book, the types of discrimination they experienced, whether they felt the freedom to have their names published, and so on. Dr. Bergman mentioned many people who did not want their identities revealed, but this book is not built on a vapor: in the index under “Victims of Discrimination” there are 46 actual names.

Are 46 names over the span of decades enough to establish a pattern of discrimination? I’m trying to view this from a skeptical standpoint (the position of the person who hated Expelled.) To be convincing on that level, it would have helped to have more than 46, and especially for many of them to have been more recent. On the other hand there is no denying the general academic environment, especially in fields related to biology, with respect to Darwin doubters. The attitude of discrimination surely exists. (The relative lack of names is obviously understandable in light of that.) What Bergman needed to show is that this is of a sort that a) extends beyond appropriate discrimination on relevant grounds as described above, and b) has caused true harm among those subjected to it. Bergman most assuredly accomplished both.

What happens to people who don’t toe the Darwinist line? Bergman tells us:

  • The noted astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe, no creationist himself, nevertheless spoke out in favor of two-model teaching, and in return he received death threats and “chilling letters and taped telephone calls for months.” (The quote is from Discover Magazine, hardly a bastion of creationist bias.)
  • One of Tom Jungmann’s professors at San Jose State wrote in a letter of reference (accidentally mailed to Jungmann), that “since he did not believe in evolution, and had other associated religious constraints” he had been required to do additional work for his Master’s degree in biology, and was not recommended for Ph.D. studies, in spite of excellent work in his Master’s degree program.
  • Professor John W. Patterson at Iowa State University “actually believes that it is the university’s responsibility to terminate creationists and rescind their degrees! Even students with excellent grades who produce highly regarded work should be denied their degree … and should be expelled from the university if it is discovered that they are Darwin skeptics.”
  • A highly regarded seminar on the interaction of religion and faith, led by Dr. Richard Bube at Stanford, was found to be unsuitable because “it openly discussed the ‘relationship between only the Judeo-Christian religion and science.'” A departmental committee decided that “only a ‘critical examination of the religious perspectives was permissible.'”
  • Professor Dean Kenyon at San Francisco State University began to doubt that the chemical evolution theory, on which he had co-authored a college textbook, was adequate to explain the origin of life. For this he was dubbed a “creationist.” His department chair told him, “I order you not to discuss creationism in your class. You can regard that as a direct order!” Kenyon asked him to define what he meant by creationism, and got only a vague reply. (Sounds familiar.)

And so it goes, chapter upon chapter, story upon story, documented in footnotes and 70 pages of bibliography. The stories extend to disciplines beyond biology, even to a social studies teacher (don’t they tell us ID “belongs in a social studies curriculum, not in science”?). Careers have been torpedoed, and even marriages broken up through the stresses of pressure directed against Darwin skeptics. These men and women are not academic rejects in the usual sense of the term: they’re people who have done well in their fields, and who have demonstrated competence in their understanding of the reigning dogma but would not give it their full and unswerving allegiance. For their beliefs (scientific and religious), not for their professional abilities, they have been ousted. Dozens of them, named; many more of them not willing to have their identities published in a book like this, for understandable reasons.

And then near the end Dr. Bergman presents three scientists as exceptions of the sort that “prove the rule.” One of them I had not previously known of as being a theist, much less a doubter of Darwin. Having read his story now, I like to think of him in context of the oft-repeated claim that believing God’s hand is in nature stifles curiosity and in the end will eventually kill science. I think of it also in light of the joking line, “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist…” for it demonstrates that most of us think of rocket scientists as being rather intelligent.

The person in question here is a believer in design, and therefore under the stereotypes ought never to be a scientist of any account. Not so, however–he was in fact a rocket scientist. And not just any rocket scientist: it’s Wernher von Braun, virtually the inventor of rocket science, and certainly the most prominent figure in its history. He wrote,

The more we learn about God’s creation, the more I am impressed with the orderliness and unerring perfection of the natural laws that govern it. In this perfection, man—the scientist—catches a glimpse of the Creator and his design for nature. The man-to-God relationship is deepened in the devout scientist as his knowledge of the natural laws grows.

and elsewhere,

While the admission of a design for the universe ultimately raises the question of a Designer (a subject outside of science), the scientific method does not allow us to exclude data which lead to the conclusion that the universe, life and man are based on design. To be forced to believe only one conclusion—that everything in the universe happened by chance—would violate the very objectivity of science itself….

They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But, must we really light a candle to see the Sun?

I don’t know when he first spoke these sorts of things, but these lines at least were credited to him in the last decade of his life, long after he had developed the first workable rocket, and a few years after he had guided the scientific team that put a man on the moon. It was safe then. What if Dr. von Braun were just entering graduate school today, and expressed beliefs of that sort? Dr. Bergman shows that there is a strong chance that this man, surely one of the ten or twenty greatest scientists of the twentieth century, would be considered unfit to enter the program.

Which leads to a final thought: maybe there actually is another potential Wernher von Braun seeking entrance to graduate school today, voicing thoughts like these, and being therefore branded as unfit to be a scientist. Intelligent Design is accused of being a science stopper, but what could stop science more effectively than slaughtering the dissidents?

Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters by Dr. Jerry Bergman, with contributions by Dr. D. James Kennedy, Dr. John Eidsmoe, and Kevin Wirth. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press, 2008. 448 pages including index and bibliography. Amazon Price US$25.00.

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3 Responses

  1. Al says:

    Appreciate you pointing out this book to me. I’ll have to give it a read.

  1. December 18, 2008

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