At Panda’s Thumb Jack Krebs has an interesting post on the famous IDer, William Dembski, and his apparent drift towards belief in young earth creationism, including the idea that Noah’s Flood was a global historical event. Krebs, for example, quotes William Dembski recently saying this about the Flood:
[I]n a brief section [of The End of Christianity ] on Genesis 4-11, I weigh in on the Flood, raising questions about its universality, without adequate study or reflection on my part. Before I write on this topic again, I have much exegetical, historical, and theological work to do. In any case, not only Genesis 6-9 but also Jesus in Matthew 24 and Peter in Second Peter seem clearly to teach that the Flood was universal. As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality.
If this sounds like someone retracting a previously expressed opinion to keep his job (Dembski teaches at the conservative Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Texas) you’re probably correct about this, for Krebs also quotes from the Florida Baptist Witness the following:
[Seminary President Paige] Patterson said that when Dembski’s questionable statements came to light, he convened a meeting with Dembski and several high-ranking administrators at the seminary. At that meeting, Dembski was quick to admit that he was wrong about the flood, Patterson said.
“Had I had any inkling that Dr. Dembski was actually denying the absolute trustworthiness of the Bible, then that would have, of course, ended his relationship with the school,” he said.
Wouldn’t it have been ironic if William Dembski had been expelled? And with regard to the video below, can we say projection?
Prometheus Unbound 
Santi
Presumably the authoritarian seminary subject of this post is training ministers who will then go out and preach to the converted and help indoctrinate their children.
This is the sort of “situation” that “Humanistic atheists accept”, according to Linkert (your post 3 days ago). It gets mocked and ridiculed by the ‘new atheists’, which he (and you, apparently) disapprove of.
Enough already of the ‘humanistic’ sort, I’m with the ‘new atheists’.
-Colin
Colin,
William Dembski would not want my pity, but I feel a bit sorry for him. He’s smart, and he makes interesting points about the complexity of nature and why this makes God’s existence at least plausible. And when he tries to think outside the box that he has submitted himself to he gets pressure to get back in (by people much less intelligent than he is). It must be frustrating for him.
And he is part of a “machine” that reproduces a good deal of stupidity in the world (but not unmixed with good, which you perhaps don’t want to acknowledge). For example, keeping Jesus’s example of human kindness at the forefront of the human psyche is not necessarily a bad thing for humanity. And the image of Jesus on the cross itself is an almost perfect representation of the human condition. People are drawn to the imagio because it speaks to their heart about things that are true.
And atheist humanists, liberals, secularists, and agnostics who “accept” such seminaries in the world do so out of an acknowledgment that freedom is also a good, as is Jesus, as are many other things that a liberal society would lose in closing down or making illegal such seminaries. You may making the perfect the enemy of the good (or at least tolerable in an imperfect world).
If, by resistance to such seminaries, you simply mean speaking out against their stupidities, then I’m with you. I did so in the above post. If, however, by resisting their stupidities you mean taking away the freedom of parents to teach their children—or even more extreme measures—I cannot follow you there. Coercion is a form of weakness, not intellectual and emotional power.
And what corruption happens to the children of the secular parents who arrest the fundamentalist parents, or take away their children from them, or refuse to let them homeschool? What happens to those childrens’s psyches? What are they learning about respect for human freedom and conscience?
—Santi