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Balmer then pulls back from the narrative of the debate for two long paragraphs filling in the history of Dembski's stormy time at Baylor—the upshot of which is that, on the account Balmer himself provides, it is difficult to imagine what Dembski was supposed to do to "correct" the moderator's introduction. Like this imputation of deceit, Balmer's physical description of Dembski suggests that he is stacking the deck, but perhaps that is exactly how Dembski appeared to him that night, and he is thereby fleshing the scene out.
There is nothing comparable in Balmer's treatment of Silver. What did he resemble that night? What was he wearing? We don't know—though Balmer does tell us at one point that Silver "reclined in his chair and flashed a confident smile." And while Balmer rightly steps back and provides extensive context for Dembski, with Silver he limits himself to a respectful summary of what the molecular biologist said in the debate.
How different this chapter would have been if Balmer had fleshed Silver out, had gone behind the scenes as he does with Dembski, had given us some impression of the man, had referred to Silver's 1997 book Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World. For Silver, as well as being a scientist honored by his peers and a skillful writer, is a man who is by turns condescending toward and openly contemptuous of Christians while making claims for science that even many of his fellow scientists would reject as hubristic. (Silver also ridicules many of the environmentalist convictions that Balmer holds dear.) I'd urge readers of Thy Kingdom Come to check out Remaking Eden and Silver's new book, published this spring by Ecco Press, Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life, wherein Silver—in the course of his magisterial account of "Science, Faith, and Religion"—explains that
Members of many religious groups are content to be left alone to practice their faith within their own communities. They are not particularly concerned about the attitudes or practices of others in the society at large who do not hold their beliefs. American Christian evangelicals, however, are different. They believe that God in the form of Jesus Christ will grant them an eternal afterlife only if they work sufficiently hard to persuade non-Christians to become evangelicals themselves.
Well, actually, no—that's not what evangelicals believe about salvation, is it? In the footnote that follows this claim, Silver refers the reader to a lecture by Mark Noll, available on the web (which, as his own summary makes clear, Silver has misunderstood), and to a Wikipedia entry.
Had some of this background been sketched, instead of a cartoonish set-piece in which the doofus Dembski comes up against the suave confidence and sweet reason of Silver, we would have seen a complex conflict. By all means look at Intelligent Design with a critical eye. But don't stop there.
Alas, this is a pattern throughout Thy Kingdom Come. In the same chapter that features the Dembski-Silver debate, Balmer takes several swipes at George Marsden, whose The Soul of the American University he describes as "William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale on steroids." Comparing Marsden with the proponents of Intelligent Design, Balmer writes:
George Marsden's vision is equally misguided, not to say quixotic. America's universities play a vital role in American life as places where, as in public schools, we confront the challenges of living in a pluralistic context. Contrary to Marsden's assertions, people of faith are welcome in that environment, but they have to compete on an equal footing in the marketplace of ideas, unlike Dembski and his colleagues, who refuse to engage in that competition.
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