I just returned from a week away (helping at Fort Knox’s Legal Assistance Office) to find this article landing in my inbox from friends far and near. Entitled “Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules” (why the “but?” Has the New York Times forgotten that many of the world’s most groundbreaking scientists were also committed believers?), the story outlines the alleged dilemma created when secular universities give doctoral degrees to . . . sharp intake of breath . . . “creationists.”

The article begins with the story of Marcus Ross, a “young earth” creationist who obtained his PhD from the University of Rhode Island after writing a dissertation about dinosaurs that adopted the “paleontological paradigm” (as he described it). In other words, the dissertation adopted the standard scientific explanations about dinosaurs — a dissertation that more secular scientists dubbed “impeccable.”

So why write an article? Is it news that public universities are granting advanced degrees to students who do good work? Well, it turns out that there is a story here. Apparently, the granting of a degree to a creationist raises “thorny philosophical and practical questions.” According to the Times, these questions are:

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?

The fact that these questions are even asked boggles the mind. What’s worse is that some leading scientists not only think the questions should be asked, they find the answers “darned near imponderable.” It’s difficult to even begin laying out all the incorrect, ignorant, and (perhaps) malicious presumptions at work in those questions, but let’s begin by answering the Times’s questions with different questions: How can a society that purports to value a free conscience and fundamental individual liberty even contemplate denying otherwise qualified individuals the degrees they earn simply because of the scientific establishment disapproves of their theology? How does one’s position as a tenured physicist or geologist qualify one to make the moral, political, and philosophical decisions necessary to determine whether a degree is “used” appropriately?

It is hardly surprising to see some university professors extending their emerging priesthood mentality (“let me teach you and tell you how you must live”) to the hard sciences, but what I found especially dispiriting was the underlying — and false — assumption that religious individuals are somehow less open to “truth” than secular scientists — that people like Marcus Ross are somehow afraid to confront hard facts. I know my own experience is anecdotal, but I attended one of the most conservative religious colleges in the United States and then one of the most secular law schools. I can tell you that the students and faculty at my religious college were far, far more open to questions and debate about their core principles than the students and faculty at Harvard Law School.

In fact, I would say that this openness was a product of our “deeply held beliefs.” If one of those beliefs involves the primacy of truth, then how can a person be “intellectually honest” without producing work that tests, probes, and questions even our most fundamental ideas and values?