Correspondence: A Father, an Atheist Son, and Darwin Heretic Matti Leisola | Faith & Science - Discovery Institute

"The father had sent his son a copy of our book, urging him to read it so the two could discuss the evidence and arguments there" argues Jonathan Witt, Author at Evolution News.

Photo: “Man Writing a Letter,” by Gabriël Metsu [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

After reading Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, a father emailed the co-authors, retired professor/bioengineer Matti Leisola and me, asking for advice about his adult atheist son. The father had sent his son a copy of the book, urging him to read it so the two could discuss the evidence and arguments there. The son, a scientist, declined. Leisola and I exchanged a few emails with the father, and he later gave us permission to summarize some of the back and forth, provided we kept the identity of him and his son private.

Fuel for Skepticism? 
According to the father, his son told him that part of what fueled his skepticism toward the book was that most of those endorsing Heretic were connected directly or indirectly to Discovery Institute and that among Leisola’s many scores of peer-reviewed papers, the tiny number of explicitly pro-design peer-reviewed papers were published by the journal BIO-Complexity, a journal the son dismissed for its connections with Discovery Institute.

But some of the peer reviewers for those articles were evolutionists with no association with DI beyond their agreeing to peer-review one or more papers for BIO-Complexity. Also, as Chapter 7 of Heretic notes, there are scores of peer-reviewed science articles supporting intelligent design. Also discussed in the book, distinguished scientists such as paleo-etymologist Günter Bechly lost their positions after voicing support for intelligent design, and science journal editor Richard Sternberg got run out of the Smithsonian Institution after accepting a pro-ID paper for peer review and eventual publication...

The son also suggested that Leisola and I could be ignored because we’re paid guns for intelligent design, apparently unaware that Leisola came to reject modern evolutionary theory before Discovery Institute even existed (made clear in the book) and has only been in communication with some of our scientists for a few years now.  
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Related link

Heretic: One Scientist's Journey
from Darwin to Design

Source: Discovery Institute