People of faith are able to work as scientists. It is worth noting that ‘belief’ is not necessarily incompatible with either science or philosophy. Scientist’s work gets peered reviewed; Philosophers publish in academic journals where their work is open to criticism: one can ’see’ that there is more subjectivity in philosophy than science; finally, questions of faith are usually related to communities of believers, traditions and sacred texts, which are even more difficult to discuss because of the faith commitment of the believer.

There are obviously good and poor scientists and philosophers; on the other hand, people of faith may argue their position poorly, practice it inconsistently, or not all, and still subscribe to their faith!

It doesn’t “ask a question:” it makes a full on accusation. But to get there, it plays ever so fast and loose with the facts. Take your WND article (not a good source to pick if accuracy is any concern). It’s listing work that’s mostly not relevant to tenure at ISU, because it was done under the auspices of other people and labs. The whole point of his time at ISU was to see whether he could make it on his own. And the reality is that his publication numbers and quality plummeted, he brought in virtually no grant money at all (compared to an average of millions for others there), and graduated no grad students in several years. WND is basically counting things that aren’t relevant to the decision, and then not telling you the rest of the story.

Nor do the emails actually support the claims made. They show that some reviewers thought ill of his ID work, but they do not show at all that this was the factor that decided anyone against him, just something they talked about. And why would they? Because it was Gonzalez who submitted his ID work to the committee for consideration in the first place!

The question here is that if ID is just good science, then why are people demanding special protection for it based on religious discrimination? Other scientific ideas don’t get such protection. If I submit a paper for review, and other scientists judge it to be lousy, am I supposed to get affirmative action just because I make a fuss about how the conclusions of the paper are connected to my religious beliefs? Either ID is science, and thus up for criticism, or it isn’t, in which case it’s wholly illegitimate that people are trying to pass it off as science. You can’t have it both ways.