ID and the scientific community
Orson Scott Card has an essay about Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I recommend you read the essay whether or not you have any interest in seeing the movie, as Card makes some very good and well-reasoned points.
I have not seen the movie yet, but the main point is that the scientific community has become somewhat closed to new ideas. In this case, Stein was seeing what the results were for trying to get Intelligent Design (ID) taught in school. ID is a theory that there is ultimately a Watchmaker, as it were, responsible for the creation of life. I agree with Card that it does not belong in school as part of a science curriculum, since it is not a scientific theory. It cannot be proven or disproven, and there is no overt evidence pointing to a Watchmaker. The fact that I believe in G-d does not mean that I think G-d belongs in science education.
Perhaps Stein was ill-served by choosing ID as his point of contention, since it creates a lot of problems on its face. I think using anthropogenic global warming would have been a better choice, since the academy is almost as closed to any arguments against the AGW religion. Still, the point of the movie was apparently more about violating any of the established barriers to other ideas than trying to push ID.
Science can only survive as long as inquiry can continue. If anyone states any scientific result as being “settled,” or that there is a “concensus,” avoid that person because they are not talking about science any more, they are talking about dogma. Science is most certainly not about concensus, it is about forming a hypothesis and then testing that hypothesis with repeatable experiments.
If they perform experiments but will not share their data, they are probably promoting an agenda. In cases where the data cannot be shared due to privacy concerns, they had better prove their model on data that can be shared. Otherwise, the results remain suspect.
Scientific inquiry must remain open to new ideas, or else we will miss too many things. No one should be afraid to examine an idea just because it goes against what they believe. If no one is willing to do that, nothing new will ever be discovered.