The petition to the Synthese editors will remain open for about another 24 hours (till around 6 pm on Monday, May 2). Those still debating whether to sign may find the following e-mail as remarkable as I do. It was sent to me by one of the Guest Editors (just a couple of days ago), and re-confirmed in its authenticity by Professor Forrest, who gave permission to release it (yesterday).

Readers will note that the letter is just from the two European editors of Synthese, Vincent Hendricks and Johan van Benthem; it was not signed by, or even, cc'd to the other EIC, John Symons. It was also not cc'd, as noted earlier, to the Guest Editors, who found about it only from Professor Forrest. As readers will recall, they then intervened and were assured, misleadingly as it turns out, that no disclaimer would be added, etc.

When Professor Forrest received the e-mail, she told Professor Hendricks that she was too busy to answer immediately; Professor Hendricks responded by telling her to take all the time she needed. Having thereafter received assurances from the Guest Editors that the Editors-in-Chief would not insist on any revisions or include a disclaimer, she never followed up. The Editors-in-Chief did not bother to reiterate their demand and went ahead with the disclaimer without telling Professor Forrest that they were going to do so.

Here is the e-mail (I have removed the e-mail addresses, including those of folks at Springer, the publisher, who are also cc'd), sent to Professor Forrest roughly nine months after the on-line publication of her article! I have inserted some editorial and informational comments of my own at various intervals.

From: Vincent Fella Hendricks

To: bforrest

CC: Johan van Benthem, "Paradijs van, Harmen", "Laarhoven van, Ingrid, Springer SBM NL", Vincent Fella Hendricks

Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:04:17 +0200

Subject: Synthese submission Dear Professor Barbara Forrest, We are writing about your paper "The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy" submitted to the special issue of Synthese: Synthese

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9539-3

http://www.springerlink.com/content/w76403r4w2226v34/export-citation/ Through a sequence of events beyond our control, a number of criticisms have reached us concerning your paper, especially its tone and manner of criticizing the views of Professor Beckwith. Given our duties as General Editors of Synthese, we were required to take notice of these, and undertake appropriate action.

This, I take it, is a straightforward admission that the editors were, in fact, lobbied by Beckwith and his supporters in the Intelligent Desigh community, as the Guest Editors had claimed and as all the evidence to date has indicated. (I am told that those lobbying the editors included not only Beckwith, but also William Dembski, about whom more in a moment--there were others, I should add.) The e-mail from Professor Hendricks continues:

We have also consulted with the editor of the special issue for your paper, but the responsability is now ours. Here is the problem as we see it. We have read your paper with great interest, since it clearly deals with important issues. But we have to say that we can also understand the ciriticisms. Here are two points that struck us. (a) The paper consistently employs a tone that makes it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of views and disqualification of their author. Here is a sample passage that, in our view, does not belong in an academic article: "Although he has been called a legal scholar (Wasley et al. 2006), he

is neither a lawyer nor, properly speaking, a constitutional scholar.

He lacks the requisite credentials and expertise, holding degrees in

philosophy, religious apologetics, and a Master of Juridical Studies

(M.J.S.) from the Washington University School of Law (the Discovery

Institute financed Beckwith's research for the M.J.S. with a $9000

fellowship) (Beckwith, n.d.). " But examples could be multiplied of irrelevant personal passages of this kind.

Perhaps the EICs read Professor Forrest's article "with great interest," but they apparently did not understand its subject-matter, since they misrepresent this paragraph from her article as a "personal attack" and as "irrelevant". The entire pro-ID movement has been committed, from the start, to credential inflation: to claiming, e.g., that "scientists" have doubts about the theory of evolution ; that there are peer-reviewed doubts about natural selection; and so on. All one need do is google "Francis Beckwith legal scholar" to discover that the pro-Intelligent Design advocates regularly tried to bolster his interventions on behalf of the constitutionality of teaching Intelligent Design in the public schools by representing him as a legal authority on the subject (this is representative, from the blog of the Discovery [sic] Institute, the main lobbying arm for Intelligent Design in the United States).

Beckwith has not made any philosophical contributions of note to the defense of Intelligent Design (the main intellectual work has been done by philosopher and mathematician William Dembski, and it is his arguments that have been the targets of detailed critiques by Elliott Sober, Branden Fitelson, and others). Beckwith's primary role, as any observer in the U.S. knows, has been as "front man" for efforts to lobby school boards to undermine biology education: he is, as I noted earlier, primarily a political and religious activist. Many readers of the special issue have puzzled over the title ("Evolution and Its Rivals"), since the very idea that evolution has any scientific "rivals" seems odd. But it does have political rivals, like Beckwith and the Discovery [sic] Institute (of which he was a longtime Fellow), which have taken the battle not to the scholarly arena, but the "local politics" of school board elections and deliberations. Since it is central to Professor Forrest's article to explain the history and sociology of a movement with a "non-epistemology," all the details about Beckwith are relevant details, not irrelevant ones.

Professor Hendricks' e-mail to Professor Forrest continues: