Richard Dawkins takes a slightly harder line than I do on the case of Gaskell, the astronomer who didn’t get a job because his potential employers objected to his faith-based mangling of evolutionary biology. Dawkins regards that as entirely justifiable, and makes a good case.

A commentator on a website discussing the Gaskell affair went so far as to write, “If Gaskell has produced sound, peer-reviewed literature of high quality then I see no reason for denying him the position, even if he believes Mars is the egg of a giant purple Mongoose”. That commentator probably felt rather pleased with his imagery, but I don’t believe he could seriously defend the point he makes with it and I hope most of my readers would not follow him. There are at least some imaginable circumstances in which most sensible people would practise negative discrimination.

If you disagree, I offer the following argument. Even if a doctor’s belief in the stork theory of reproduction is technically irrelevant to his competence as an eye surgeon, it tells you something about him. It is revealing. It is relevant in a general way to whether we would wish him to treat us or teach us. A patient could reasonably shrink from entrusting her eyes to a doctor whose beliefs (admittedly in the apparently unrelated field of obstetrics) are so cataclysmically disconnected from reality. And a student could reasonably object to being taught geography by a professor who is prepared to take a salary to teach, however brilliantly, what he believes is a lie. I think those are good grounds to impugn his moral character if not his sanity, and a student would be wise to avoid his classes.

That’s all true. We’ve got a new wave of creationists like Wells and Ross who are going through the motions of graduate programs to earn degrees in subjects they intend only to repudiate, who basically lie their way through a program of advanced study, and I wouldn’t want to hire them or even trust them. Marcus Ross, for instance, wrote a whole thesis on Cretaceous paleontology while publicly professing at creationist meetings that the earth is less than 10,000 years old — who in their right mind would hire such a confused and deceptive fellow for a job which involves regularly dealing with geologic ages?

These aren’t minor, scientific disagreements, like hiring a paleontologist who emphasizes punctuated equilibrium or neutral theory in his analysis; those are legitimate scientific issues that will be resolved with evidence. These are people who throw out the evidence in favor of their religious dogma, and they are about as anti-scientific as you can get.

We’re about to re-open a search for a tenure-track position at my university. If Jonathan Wells applied, how far do you think he’d get in the review? We’d examine his application with the same impartial eye we do all the others, but the fact that he has demonstrated his incompetence in biology in his books and public speaking events, and has a known malicious intent to ‘destroy Darwinism’ means it would be round-filed very early in the process—and if you were privy to committee comments during the review, they’d probably involve lots of incredulous expletives. Would that be discrimination? I don’t think so. He’s patently unsuitable for the job.

On the other hand, many of the applicants to our position would likely be Christian with varying degrees of devotion — but if their work, the basis for hiring that person, showed no attempt to shoehorn personal and private ideas that I, for instance, find ridiculous, into their science, then it wouldn’t be an issue. Christians believe in something as absurd as the purple mongoose egg theory, this whole bizarre notion of incarnated gods dying to magically redeem us from a distant ancestor’s dietary error, but good scientists are capable of switching that nonsense off entirely in the lab, and are also aware of the impact on their credibility of espousing folly…if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be good scientists (or they’re Nobel prize winners who know they can get away with it now).

We have to be careful about letting personal disagreements on matters of taste intrude on our decisions; if the person has been circumspect about keeping them from poisoning a body of good work, I’m willing to accommodate them. The alternative is that we start rejecting applicants because we discover that they listen to 70s hair metal bands while they work, are fans of the New York Yankees, or put milk in their teacup before they add the hot water, all irrational and unforgiveable heresies. It’s all fine unless they join a Poison tribute band and start slopping dairy products about with manic abandon.

Cothran, an analyst for one of those right-wing religious think tanks, the Family Patriarchy Foundation, has written an op-ed rebuking the University of Kentucky for discrimination against Christians. It is breathtakingly ridiculous. He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious oppression, overt discrimination against him for the fact of being a Christian. A university in America would have virtually no faculty or staff if they had an unspoken policy of discrimination against the Christian majority in this country; there were believers on that committee, I’m sure, just as there are believers on every committee I’ve ever worked with at my universities, and the atheists are usually the minority. So to claim that this committee thought that the idea of a candidate going to church was grounds for exclusion is absurd.

Gaskell’s employment was questioned, not because he is a Christian, but because he is an evangelical Christian who used his authority as an astronomer to mislead the public about biology. That was a question of responsibility and competence, well within the domain of inquiry by a hiring committee. It was not about his private, personal religious practices, but how he would engage the public.

Cothran, though, has to carry his argument into the realm of offensive stupidity.

One of its arguments used to defend UK’s actions was that Gaskell would have public outreach responsibilities and that his religious views would embarrass the university.

Let’s apply this to a similar discrimination case against, say, an African-American, a group protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Let’s say the University of Kentucky was looking for an agriculture extension officer for a part of the state with a racist history. The job obviously involved public outreach.

And let’s say an African-American applied for the job and was clearly the most qualified applicant.

But there were faculty and staff who indicated in e-mails they didn’t think highly of blacks and who engaged in a concerted effort to torpedo his candidacy for the job, and one of the reasons was that they felt his race would impair his ability to do outreach in this part of the state.

I think we all know what would happen, and it would have little to do with a potential hire embarrassing the University of Kentucky. It would have a whole lot to do with the university embarrassing itself.

This isn’t diversity. It isn’t equal treatment. It isn’t tolerance. UK got off the hook by paying a relatively small settlement in the case.

Right. Christians. Just like the oppressed African-American minority, with their long history of suffering and repression, and their current underprivileged state in which they are excluded from positions of leadership by bigotry. That whole argument reveals much about Martin Cothran and his coddled Christian privilege, and not much about the University of Kentucky.

In his hypothetical example, imagine that this well-qualified applicant was great at helping farmers with the job of raising crops (he’s well qualified!), but would also go off and lecture them about how Kentucky was first settled by Egyptians who developed the system of agriculture, Kentucky bluegrass, and thoroughbred racehorses, which are all descended from purely African stock. I think the agriculture department would be justified in questioning his suitability for employment, not because of his race, but because he is promoting false ideas justified by a very narrow and ignorant myth about African contributions to history.

That’s Gaskell. He wasn’t turned away because he was a Christian, but because he actively uses Christianity as an excuse to peddle falsehoods and doubts. And the objection wasn’t to the “Christian” part, but to the “false doubts” part.

Martin Gaskell, the astronomer who wasn’t hired at the University of Kentucky (my words were chosen carefully; that really is the only ‘crime’ against him), has won an out-of-court settlement in his discrimination suit, and has gone on to give an interview which confirms my opinion of him: Kentucky is better off not having this credulous guy on the staff. He now insists that he is a supporter of evolution, a fact not in evidence in his writings about the field, and also not evident in his answers to his dodgy replies to specific questions in the interview.

But the real problem is his complete lack of any kind of scientific filter in his evaluation of the literature. This is a man more likely to cite a religious source to answer a question about biology than to refer to any of the scientific evidence; he gets his biology from Hugh Ross, Josh MacDowell, and Philip Johnson. He expresses his gullibility well in this interview; this comment made my jaw drop, at least.

What are your thoughts on the paradox between public universities needing to teach scientific fact and the fact that they receive government funding and thus are likely not allowed to discriminate on the basis of religious beliefs, which may contradict scientific fact (e.g. believers in the young earth premise)? (And I mean this in the sense that this debate could come up for a biology faculty position, in which your beliefs might actually affect what you are teaching.)

Dr. Gaskell:
This HAS come up multiple times with biology positions. There is a good book covering this in great detail. It is called “Slaughter of the Dissidents” by Jerry Bergman. I’d highly recommend getting a copy to understand what goes on. The recurrent problem you’ll find if you look at the cases documented in the book is that Christian biologists get fired or demoted not because of what they actually teach or do in their research, but because of who they are.

See what I mean? He’s citing Jerry “Nine Degrees” Bergman, a liar and known nutcase. I’ve met Jerry Bergman; I’ve debated Jerry Bergman; I’ve read Slaughter of the Dissidents, which doesn’t document anything other than the paranoia and lunacy of its author.

You cannot take Bergman seriously. Bergman is the fellow who announced that there was a conspiracy among evolutionists to get the periodic table of the elements ripped down from classroom walls because it was a document that supported creationism; he claims to know a Christian chemistry teacher who was fired for daring to post Mendeleev’s work. This is the Jerry Bergman who also claimed that carbon is irreducibly complex, thereby proving that Intelligent Design creationism was true. So Gaskell actually recommends Bergman’s work? I wouldn’t hire him for that alone. That’s a kind of fundamental incompetence.

And Gaskell just digs his grave a little deeper.

This is a major problem in the life sciences. One recent major survey showed that 51% of scientists in the life sciences believe in some sort of “higher power” (which most of them identify as “God”). Half of all scientists also claim a religious affiliation. There is an enormous problem if one disqualifies one half of biologists because of religious
affiliation or beliefs!

But that makes no sense! If over half of all biologists are believers, doesn’t that fact right there say that biologists don’t get disqualified for their beliefs? I’ve been in this business for almost 30 years, and I’ve never once seen a committee meeting disrupted by bickering over differing religious beliefs — they are generally regarded as about as irrelevant on the job as what sports teams the faculty are rooting for. The only place where it could come up is if a faculty person started babbling irrational fairy stories that contradicted solid scientific thinking…and then they would be getting in trouble for bad science, not for what church they go to.

That’s what made Gaskell a poor candidate for the position at UK: that he was publicly promoting bad science.

Gaskell is an astronomer who applied for a job at the University of Kentucky, and didn’t get it. This is not news. The great majority of the people who apply for jobs in the sciences don’t get them, even if they are well qualified — the rejected candidates know just to pick up and move on to the next application, because it is so routine.

Not Martin Gaskell, though. Gaskell is suing the university for not hiring him, which is amazing: when I was on the job market, I sent out at least one hundred applications, and ultimately got hired for one, so I guess that means I missed 99 potentially lucrative lawsuit opportunities. Dang. Is there a statute of limitations on civil suits?

Of course, Gaskell has a predisposition: he’s a devout Christian, so that persecution complex is rooted deeply. He claims he was denied the job because he’s an evangelical Christian. I say he’s just inventing rationalizations…something else his religion has made him very good at. And the newspapers are helping him out.

No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 — until his writings on evolution came to light.

Wrong. I’ll deny it. The leading candidate is the one you make an offer to — and the identity of that person varies throughout the review process. You can talk about a “leading candidate” when you look at just the cover letters and CVs; you’ll probably have a different “leading candidate” when you’ve had a chance to read through all the letters of recommendation; it’ll change again when you do the phone interviews; it’ll change again when you’ve had the on-campus interviews; and it’ll change again as the committee hashes over the discussions before making the final offer. This always happens. It’s ridiculous to complain that it was somehow unfair that facts emerged during a fact-finding process.

I’m in the middle (nearer the end, I’m pretty sure) of a job search to hire a new faculty member here at UMM, so I know whereof I speak. It doesn’t matter that Gaskell was well qualified for the job, since most of the applicants were probably well qualified; making a hiring commitment is a big deal that involves consideration of a great many factors, including subjective personal ones, so you simply can’t complain about individuals not getting the job. It’s fair to look for systematic bias, though, but Gaskell can’t make a case there. He claims he wasn’t hired because he’s a Christian.

I don’t believe it. There is no pattern of discrimination against the dominant religious group in the country, and Gaskell knows it. If you look at one of the documents he has written about his beliefs, scroll down to the very end, where you’ll find that Gaskell has a long list of religious organizations, like the ASA, the Affiliation of Christian Biologists, the Christian Engineering Society, etc., etc., etc. It seems that being a Christian is not considered a de facto strike against the possibility of being a scientist or engineer.

The fact that some Christians are in the sciences doesn’t argue against the fact that they could be under-represented, and face an unfair uphill struggle to get jobs. However, being a Christian is not like being a woman: it’s not something that is necessarily obvious in a job interview. We don’t ask candidates where they go to church, and if we find out, we don’t care (not even me, the arch-atheist, will bat an eye if you let slip that you attend). Gaskell will have to show that the search committee was opposed in even a vague sense to hiring a Christian, and he can’t do that. Why? Because there’s a great big fat loomin’ obvious Problem with a capital “P” splatted putridly in the pages of his CV, and all of the concern in hiring him was with that, not where he went to church.

Gaskell is an evolution-denier. He’s an old-earth creationist, a theistic evolutionist who looks favorably on Intelligent Design creationism.

It’s evident in his public defense of the Book of Genesis, in which he goes on and on with unlikely rationalizations for a metaphorical interpretation. This is a fellow who says, “It is true that there are significant scientific problems in evolutionary theory (a good thing or else many biologists and geologists would be out of a job) and that these problems are bigger than is usually made out in introductory geology/biology courses“, and then goes on to endorse Josh McDowell, Phillip Johnson, Harun Yahya, Hugh Ross, and the day-age interpretation of Genesis, as if they are somehow not afflicted with these “problems”.

There is a difference between accepting a theory that is incomplete, like evolution, and a set of wacky ideas that are contradicted by the available evidence, like these various flavors of creationism that Gaskell is favoring. That calls his ability to think scientifically into question, and that is legitimate grounds to abstain from hiring him.

The record shows that what people were discussing was not his religion alone, but the way his religion has affected his job as a scientist and communicator of science, and the effect of hiring someone with such dubious views in a state already trying to overcome the embarrassment of being home to the Creation “Museum”. These are valid concerns. It’s also a fact that when hiring, we want to have people whose skills we can respect as colleagues, and Gaskell was not in a good position that way. One of the faculty members who reviewed the case said it very well:

Another geology professor, Shelly Steiner, wrote that UK [University of Kentucky] should no more hire an astronomer skeptical of evolution than “a biologist who believed that the sun revolved around the Earth.”

That’s the bottom line. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that Gaskell was exceptionally competent in the very narrow domain of his astronomical work, but faculty don’t get hired to do only one thing, and Gaskell himself is quite clear that he isn’t going to confine himself to talking only about his field…and unfortunately, it’s also clear that he was a confused and ignorant boob about all the other subjects he was happy to lecture about.