Okay, so it’s 9:30ish and I’m driving my 40-ish minute commute from the town of Cedar Falls (where I go to college) to my house in Jesup (where I will continue to live for the next month). As I drive, I find myself listening to talk radio. Because I’m wicked cool. The radio show is, if I recall correctly, Focus On The Family with outspoken Christian Dr. James Dobson (I’m struggling with adjectives to imply that he is a Christian–which is pertinent to this topic–yet show respect for his opinions).

Because this is a predominately Liberal site, I’d like to establish some credibility and say that I’m politically moderate, religiously Christian, and altogether very critical of the good Doctor. In my personal opinion, he goes to lengths to make it seem that liberals and homosexuals and everyone who doesn’t think similarly to him are all collectively conspiring against Christianity (and it is my belief that this actually fuels the fires between Christian and Atheist/Agnostic and between Liberal/Conservative). But I digress.

I tuned in on the middle of the show, so I missed out on who he was interviewing; however, it was regarding the upcoming film “Expelled” so I presume it was actor and filmmaker Ben Stein (“Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?”). Oh yeah, I think it’s important to know that he’s Jewish according to Wikipedia.

Anyways, the movie “Expelled” is based on the premise that modern scientists are beginning to ignore evidence that could potentially act against Darwinism. I think his specific beef with modern academia is that it rejects the possibility of an intelligent designer, which outspoken Evolutionist Richard Dawkins even professes is a possibility (and if something is a possibility, why should it not be considered?). In an interview with CitizenLink, Stein says, “Darwinism had led to academic suppression. Anyone who questioned the orthodoxy of Darwinism was losing his job, getting harassed, losing his grants, losing his office, her office.” In other words, the scientific community is exercising the same closed-mindedness and intolerance that (or so I believe) the religious community had exercised over society and even over the scientific community for a long time.

While I probably don’t believe the same things as Stein or Dobson, I do feel that when we stop being open-minded and examining the other perspective, we become ignorant. I think that’s a trait commonly ascribed to political conservatives, so for liberal academia to prevent itself from being viewed as hypocrites (God bless FireFox’s spellcheck feature. WTF? “Spellcheck” isn’t a word?) it will need to be more accepting of alternate viewpoints (meaning state the evidence for that viewpoint as well as the evidence for opposing viewpoints) or, if the viewpoints are disprovable, illustrate that by academic/scientific means. Basically just be ethical and stop the agenda-pushing.

Although I am a college student (and my tower of priorities has doing-my-homework trailing distantly behind playing guitar and Facebooking–which should, in fact, be an accepted verb IMO), I think this article has been pretty well-researched (more-so than some of my papers and presentations) and I am pretty proud of it. If you’re willing to overlook what I believe to be some biases, I think you’ll also find the actual interview (which I still haven’t listened to in its entirety) to be somewhat interesting.

Discuss.