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Nature‘s “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” Reviewer, Adam Rutherford, Calls Guillermo Gonzalez “crap scientist”
Nature recently carried a glowing review of “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design” which uses strong language to attack ID: “Judgment Day gracefully avoids ridiculing intelligent design for the pseudo-intellectual fundamentalist fig-leaf that it is.” Rather than make any attacks against the reviewer, Adam Rutherford, I’ll just let Mr. Rutherford speak for himself: “were I in a position to offer Guillermo Gonzalez tenure, I would deny it for the precise reason that his, yes, religious views about purpose in the universe explicitly mean he is a crap scientist.” (emphasis added)
Rutherford continues:
Guillermo Gonzalez has been denied a physics post by his university. Quite right: you cannot believe in ID and call yourself a scientist. So farewell, I hope, to the scientific career of Guillermo Gonzalez. … I know that, were I in a position to offer Guillermo Gonzalez tenure, I would deny it for the precise reason that his, yes, religious views about purpose in the universe explicitly mean he is a crap scientist, regardless of his ability to generate valid data. … As a vocal supporter of the demonstrably unscientific guff that is intelligent design, Gonzalez displays ignorance of the scientific process, and appears to wilfully [sic] defy it. And for that reason, he neither deserves the use of the facilities of a university to conduct scientific research, nor the privilege of teaching the next generation of scientists.
(Adam Rutherford, “Wrong by Design“)
It’s worth mentioning that Rutherford’s review came out a week before the “Judgment Day” documentary was released. How did he get the opportunity to view such a pre-screening? Someone inside Nature or PBS must have hand-picked Rutherford to view a sneak preview of the documentary. Apparently these are the views of those who are chosen to review PBS documentaries in the world’s top scientific journals.