'Cause one kid had it worse than that, 'Cause then there was this boy whose parents made him come directly home right after school

Without comment, we'll start tonight with one of the best image captions of all time:

A grilled cheese sandwich, top, with an image of what some see as the Virgin Mary sold for $28,000 on eBay. Jesus Christ is seen in an oyster shell, a frying pan and a pirogi.

Anyway, form the same fine newspaper, another story on the Academy, this time in relation to religious kooks Young Earth Creationists getting geosciences doctorates. From the article:

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”
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And, for some, his case raises thorny philosophical and practical questions. May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

I don't find these questions particularly difficult to answer: no, yes, absolutely not.

Look, a degree is conferred upon a student for completing a specified body of work. Even under that standard, there is a tremendous amount of subjectivity involved, and the last thing we need to do is to add to that a level of psychological study of the candidate's motivations and future plans. If you happen to be a complete whackjob but produce a worthy dissertation, then you have earned a doctorate. Many a physicist was a kook while still in school, and a great many more became so later, but they are all PhD physicists just the same.

In the end, science progresses onward even though many people fail to understand it, even some of those considered within the scientific community. The structure that has been established, though, works remarkably well, and it is dangerous to go tampering with it, especially with regards to religion. For all the happy talk about coexistence between science and religion, they are occasionally orthogonal and frequently contradictory (see, e.g., the argument from Free Will for one example), and science really does do best to avoid any mention of religion in its internal workings. Sure, science has a role in interacting with and sometimes confronting religion, like with matters of homosexuality being genetically determined or making sure that evolution is taught in schools, but these are external interactions between science and society. In other words, religion doesn't have much place during a qualifying exam or dissertation defense: these are scientific rites of passage independent of religion.

A telling quote from the article:

Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists.

Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a private group on the front line of the battle for the teaching of evolution, said fundamentalists who capitalized on secular credentials “to miseducate the public” were doing a disservice.

Using a credential to miseducate the public is a completely reasonable thing to fear, but it results from those with an agenda taking advantage of people's ignorance, and is used by all sides in the debate. People somehow believe that if you've earned a doctorate in anything, it makes you an expert. I can talk about economics endlessly, but the closest I ever came to an Econ course was when I skimmed through one of my wife's textbooks. Still, if I, a PhD, start talking about free trade, there are people out there who will listen. I'll admit, academics often throw their credentialed weight around in support of liberal causes, and the world is often better for it. In a perfect world, however, audiences would learn to be more skeptical, and try to learn a little bit about an issue for themselves. With regard to global warming, there are numerous Climate Science PhDs who don't believe in its existence, and most of them have been interviewed as experts on FoxNews by now. Said group also makes up a ridiculously small percentage of the total community of climate scientists, the latter of whom clearly have a consensus view that global warming is a severe problem.

Lest I make it seem that Young Earth Creationists in the academy are just swell, I have to admit that I am stunned by the philosophical nonsense being spouted by Dr. Ross. These theories aren't interchangeable "paradigms" that can be switched in and out like CDs in a changer. They make assumptions about the very way in which the world works, with concrete and fundamentally contradictory implications for the planet and the universe. To be honest, most of the classic syntheses of religion and science are basically nonsense. A God who meddles in human affairs has a wacky sense of scale, given that we are just vastly insignificant in the grand scheme, and the level of suffering we go through is simply inexcusable if a higher being cared about us. A god who performed miracles in the past but not today, or miracles just for a select few perhaps, is one with a strange sense of favoritism. If God is mere clockmaker and tinkerer, then he really isn't a moral force, he's something of an engineer or computer programmer. As I mentioned before, it looks like he/she/they/God/Goddesses didn't even grant us free will at all, and we just fool ourselves into thinking we do. If Dr. Ross couldn't deal with these ideas, then he's not much of a scientific philosopher, but he is, and rightly so, a Doctor in the sciences.