Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Nick Matzke, just forget the debacle and move on, okay …

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Here Darwin stalwart Nick Matzke gamely attempts to defend Barbara Forrest in the Beckwith Synthese affair, by pretending that there is some important discrepancy as to Beckwith’s unsympathetic views re intelligent design theory. Some background here.

Matzke must hope that everyone will overlook the fact that it was Forrest’s responsibility to get her facts right before she attempted a character assassination on Beckwith, and she signally failed to do so. Why Matzke and others can’t just accept that and move on remains a mystery.

Beckwith has always maintained a principle that may be difficult for some  to grasp: That he can disapprove of a point of view while thinking that schools may constitutionally teach it.

However, some people’s possible confusion on this point is not an excuse for a prof like Forrest, who is expected to understand precisely these sorts of things. Nor should it deter the rest of us from insisting on higher standards of scholarship than she showed.

More public information on Beckwith and ID here and here (this latter is dated 2008, but Forrest, a supposed expert, writes as if she didn’t know?).

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