The perennially entertaining Discovery Institute is at it again — if you don’t know, the DI is the foremost organisation devoted to Intelligent Design. This time, they’ve done themselves proud. It seems that an astronomer by the name of Professor Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University because he believes in Intelligent Design. At least, this is what the DI would like you to believe. They’ve certainly been issuing press statements and blog comments to that effect. The truth is rather more prosaic: the Iowa State astronomy department rejects about one in every three tenure applications, so it is hardly a rare event, and more to the point than his ID credentials, in seven years at Iowa State, Gonzalez has not had a great track record with publishing new papers, attracting research grants, or supervising PhD students to completion. With that record, Gonzalez wouldn’t get tenure if he was the Dean’s secret boyfriend. Nobody has questioned the quality of the research Gonzales has published — by all accounts, his papers are excellent and have made solid contributions to astronomy. But his best work was ten years ago.

Of course, reality has little to do with the DI public relations game. They’ve played the martyr card before when Richard Sternberg was sacked from the Smithsonian Institute for publishing a pro-ID paper in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Again, the reality was quite different. Sternberg bypassed the editorial protocols of the journal to publish a poor piece of work that the journal retracted after publication. He wasn’t even sacked from the Smithsonian Institute. He had, in fact, never been employed by the Smithsonian. He was an unpaid research associate whose time there expired naturally.

The DI got a good deal of PR traction with the Sternberg case, and they’re at it again, this time with two brand new strategies. The first: the DI repeated Gonzalez’s claim that he was the victim of religious discrimination. Now let’s remember, folks, that the DI has been telling us over and over that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory, not a religious belief. Of course, anyone who has been following the DI already knows that the “ID is science” claim is a complete sham used when not among friends. Whenever DI fellows have spoken at religious or evangelical meetings, they’ve made no disguise of their religious agenda.

But the second strategy is even more outrageous. The DI decided to question why Gonzalez was denied tenure when outspoken secular humanist Hector Avalos was granted tenure at Iowa State. The DI went into full swiftboat mode, digging through Avalos’s record to see what dirt they could reveal. And lo and behold, DI’s William Dembski discovered that Hector Avalos had inflated his publication record. Avalos’s CV referred to a paper published in Mercury: The Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 27 no. 2 (March/April, 1998), pages 20-24. As Dembski revealed:

It is actually called “Mercury Magazine,” and is not the ASP’s academic journal. It is its membership magazine. In fact, ASP does not list it as an academic journal but under the category of magazine: www.astrosociety.org/pubs.html.

Except Dembski was dead wrong. The magazine was called Mercury: The Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific at the time it published Avalos’s paper. It changed its name at a later time. So Avalos had cited his reference correctly, a fact that would have taken Dembski all of five minutes’ research to learn if he had been so inclined. It also lead Dembski to make this statement:

That’s why Avalos says it passed editorial muster but not peer-review muster. This way he can fudge on the article’s status but have plausible deniability. This is also evident by his placing in the magazine’s subtitle “The Journal of…” even though it is not there in the actual publication.

Isn’t this amazing? Dembski accuses Avalos of being dishonest by the remarkable strategy of telling the truth. Avalos never claimed it was peer-reviewed, so he didn’t lie, which goes to show how sneaky he is. Memo Prof. Dembski: “Plausible denial” doesn’t just apply to conspiratorial misdirection; it also applies to things that can be plausibly denied because they aren’t true.

When Avalos pointed out the facts to Dembski, you would think that he would take a step back and maybe even apologise. But then you would be thinking of normal socialised adults, not DI fellows.

To Hector Avalos: I’m happy to concede whatever other designations the periodical MERCURY may have. The larger issue is that it is a popular periodical and you cite your piece in it as though it had some leverage against Guillermo Gonzalez and his scholarship.

In other words, somehow or other Dembski is going to find fault with Avalos regardless of the facts. A more detailed description of this exchange can be found at the Panda’s Thumb. But what I am most interested in is the underlying logic behind Dembski’s attack on Avalos. Because, you see, Avalos may work at the same university, but he is a professor in the anthropology department not the physics/astronomy department. That is, the people who decided to offer Avalos tenure are not the people who denied Gonzalez tenure. Avalos’s tenure had nothing to do with Gonzalez’s tenure, nothing at all. This is yet another example of what I have shown a few times recently: whenever the pulpiteers get themselves tied in knots, their first defence is to find an atheist to attack. The atheist in question doesn’t even have to have anything to do with the subject at hand. Here’s some icing on the cake from Dembski:

Third, if Avalos has fudged on the status of this article—and has done so in a very public way—his CV may loaded with this type of fluff. Perhaps it’s time to start hunting for the real witch.

So Avalos is the real witch, huh? For what? For being an atheist. And for telling the truth when it would suit Dembski better if he lied. Given the apt choice of words, one can only wonder whether Dembski secretly longs to be the new Witchfinder General.