The hiring committee focused on the science in these lecture notes, but didn’t focus on what may have been more problematic for them if they’d hired Gaskell—his attitude towards atheism. UK’s governing regulations state that their faculty and staff may make public statements on anything, but they must make sure that their statements are, among other things, “accurate.” I’m sure Dr. Gaskell believes his statements about atheism are accurate, but they’re so incompletely researched that allowing him to continue giving his lecture about astronomy “supporting the details of Genesis I” could have led to lawsuits UK would have had a harder time defending.
Gaskell opens the introduction of his lecture comparing the encyclopedia entry (from the New Columbia Encyclopaedia, 1975 ed.) for “God” with that for “Atheism.” He compares a proposed entity with a belief that no such proposed entity exists—it’s almost as legitimate a comparison as apples and oranges. He states how impressed he is with the comparative lengths of the entries for “God” (24 cm) and “atheism,” which he reproduced in the lecture notes, and I’ll do it here, as well (from his lecture notes, although I have looked up the original):
“Atheism, denial of the existence of God or gods and of any supernatural existence, to be distinguished from AGNOSTICISM, which holds that the existence cannot be proved. The term atheism has been used as an accusation against all who attack established orthodoxy, as in the trial of Socrates. There were few avowed atheists from classical times until the 19th cent., when popular belief in a conflict between religion and science brought forth preachers of the gospel of atheism such as Robert O. [sic] Ingersoll. There are today many individuals and groups professing atheism.”
While this article has several problems, I will focus on just a few, beginning with the one that he could have fact-checked with the same encyclopedia. Robert Ingersoll’s middle initial is actually G., an error which apparently has not come to Dr. Gaskell’s attention since he started giving these lectures, and the error is Dr. Gaskell’s. The New Columbia Encyclopaedia gives Col. Ingersoll his correct middle initial, and in the encyclopedia’s article on Ingersoll, he is identified as “the great Agnostic” and the author of books including Why I Am an Agnostic. Yet, in the very same encyclopedia, in the article on atheism, which emphasizes in its first sentence the distinction between atheism and agnosticism, he’s identified as a “preacher of the gospel of atheism.” Dr. Gaskell could not be bothered to turn a few hundred pages in his single-volume encyclopedia to find out who Robert Green Ingersoll was. This is the extent of fairness Dr. Gaskell feels he should give to atheists and agnostics.
“Notice that there are no ‘proofs’ or arguments offered for atheism,” Gaskell writes, “just a reference to ‘a popular belief in a conflict between religion and science’… No logical or philosophical arguments are offered because there aren’t any!” (To be fair, Gaskell has since omitted his assertion that there aren’t any logical or philosophical arguments for atheism, but I am focusing on the lecture notes that the UK hiring committee had available to them, and I thought it important to note what Gaskell thought about atheism as recently as 2007.) In researching atheism, he went no further than two short encyclopedia articles and couldn’t be bothered to check the few facts in them.
If I had been on the hiring committee at UK, I would have been extremely concerned that Dr. Gaskell would not have treated any openly atheist or agnostic students in his classes fairly. If he won’t look up “Ingersoll” in the same encyclopedia he used to deny the existence of arguments for atheism, if he won’t bothered to talk to atheists to find out what we actually think before asserting that we don’t, if he thinks that a cursory look at a couple of encyclopedia articles is all he needs to do to understand atheism, why should an atheist or agnostic student in his class not think that Gaskell is discriminatory against them?
Instead, the UK hiring committee focused more on this passage:
“It is true that there are significant scientific problems in evolutionary theory (a good thing or else many biologists and geologists would be out of a job) and that these problems are bigger than is usually made out in introductory geology/biology courses, but the real problem with humanistic evolution is in the unwarranted atheistic assumptions and extrapolations.”
Gaskell never identifies what the “unwarranted atheistic assumptions and extrapolations” are,” but instead refers his readers/audience to the books of Phillip Johnson, who is largely credited with founding the Intelligent Design movement. In my readings in anthropology, biology, and evolution, the only “assumption” I’ve seen that could remotely be seen as “atheistic” is the scientific principle of rejecting supernatural explanations for natural processes.
It is interesting that Gaskell, who claims to have no problem with evolutionary theory, would refer his readers and audiences to Johnson, who majored in English literature before studying the law but who apparently has no significant education in science. Johnson believes that evolution is completely unsupported by evidence, a claim with which biologists strongly disagree. It seems to me that if you believe that evolution has occurred and is occurring, you do not refer your students to books by someone who does not and makes grotesquely inaccurate statements about it.
Gaskell’s references to Phillip Johnson and his near endorsement of Intelligent Design make me question how he intends his readers and audiences to take the first part of the quote above (the part about “significant problems in evolutionary theory”). It is phrased so that if he is questioned about it, he can say, as he did in his deposition in the lawsuit against UK, that all he meant was that introductory textbooks gloss over how complicated the science really is. But by referring his readers to Johnson, who claims that there is no evidence in support of evolution (a statement he can only make by ignoring all of the evidence in biology and geology and all of the work in those fields for the last 160 years or so), the statement can easily be taken a completely different way. It’s a clever turn of phrase that allows believers to reach the conclusion that evolution is junk science while still allowing Gaskell to retain the mantle of real science himself. I cannot and do not claim that he wrote that passage that way deliberately; there is too much lazy research and lazy writing in the rest of the piece to support such a claim. But if he truly accepts evolution, he may want to consider rephrasing it and/or adding a caveat to his endorsement of Johnson’s works.
Returning to atheism at the end, Gaskell writes:
“I don’t think that these questions about the origin of the universe (and of life) are just remote irrelevant cosmological questions. They profoundly affect our world views, our morals, and the way we live our lives. There is a profound difference between believing that God created the world and people in the world rather than insisting that our origin of our universe is to be traced to an accidental chance combination of blind impersonal physical forces. It [h]as been said that it is doubtful whether the latter purely mechanistic atheistic view of our origins can be a sufficient basis for such human values as goodness truth, justice and beauty, etc. And it has been argued that in the atheistic view, man is left without ultimate meaning and value, that it is pointless to speak of ‘human rights’, for example, and that in atheism existence is ultimately absurd.”
All of these statements about the absurdity of life as viewed atheistically come from Christians. They certainly don’t come from atheists. They’re straw men. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, human values and ethics require neither the promise of eternal reward nor the threat of eternal punishment but rather derive from social ties, education, and our innate sympathy. Gaskell lacks the courage to discuss atheism with atheists, or he would have done it at some point in the last fifteen or twenty years that he’s been presenting this lecture. When it comes to atheism, Gaskell allows his prejudice to guide him.
Gaskell’s lecture notes have many problems I have not covered, some because I don’t have sufficient knowledge in certain areas to deal with them, and all of them because I have no more time to devote to this. I believe I’ve supported my opinions that Gaskell is dangerously prejudiced and just as dangerously uninformed, and that his research, at least when it comes to subjects he finds distasteful (e.g., atheism, biology), is shockingly lazy and unreliable. I don’t know about you, but I would not take any class taught by Dr. Gaskell, and I would question the value of an education offered by a college or university that hired him.
