ISU professor defends reason over religion

Don’t call Hector Avalos a militant atheist with an agenda.

Instead, the Iowa State University religious studies professor asks that he be thought of as a zealot for the separation of church and state, or a crusader for American pluralism.

Avalos has been on a mission to keep his university free from a dominant religious ideology. That’s put him at the forefront of faculty petitions in the last few years, most recently opposing football coach Gene Chizik’s proposed hiring of a team chaplain and previously refuting the theory of intelligent design.

His efforts have made him a hero to some who see him as a defender of reason, but to others he’s a heathen eager to impose his atheistic views on others.

Avalos organized the petition opposing the football chaplain because he contends hiring someone for the full-time but privately paid position would violate tenets of a public university. Avalos said naming a chaplain would indicate a preference of one religion — likely evangelical Christianity — over other faiths.

He said 112 ISU faculty have signed the petition.

“The government should not be in the business of preferring a religion,” Avalos said. “We do believe our football field should not be a mission field.”

Tom Kroeschell, an ISU athletics department spokesman, said President Gregory Geoffroy has asked the Iowa State Athletics Council to consider the petition. The 18-member council, along with Athletics Director Jamie Pollard, have until Aug. 1 to consider the chaplain position.

Pollard has said he supports the hiring because student-athletes are under a lot of pressure and many would welcome access to spiritual guidance.

“Their charge is to discuss conditions under which the concept would or would not be acceptable,” Kroeschell said. “And then they’ll make a report to the president.”

Avalos said the petition reflects a coalition of people, some religious and others not, who want the university to remain inclusive.

Some aren’t buying it. They accuse Avalos of being anti-religion.

“There are some very hateful e-mails, some very angry ones,” he said. “They accuse me of having an atheist agenda, which is not true.”

Avalos, who has been at ISU since 1993, said he can weather attacks, especially given his childhood experience as a Pentecostal preacher. From age 7 to 17, he toured Arizona as a child preacher and faith healer until foregoing his faith in college.

“In one way or another I’ve been speaking out since I was young,” he said. “When I was preaching is when I had rocks thrown at me.”

He said he doesn’t impose his secular-humanist views in the classroom but fights for his ideals outside because they parallel the university’s nonreligious reputation.

That’s why two years ago he launched a petition refuting intelligent design as a legitimate science. The theory holds the universe and living things are so finely tuned and complex, they must have been designed by a supreme, intelligent force.

The petition, signed by more than 120 ISU faculty, recently burst back into the news because of controversy over the unnamed target: intelligent design advocate Guillermo Gonzalez, an ISU assistant astronomy and physics professor. The university president last month denied Gonzalez’s tenure request, leading advocates of the theory to claim discrimination.

Gonzalez is well known among supporters of the theory because he co-authored a book that supports the idea, “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery.”

Avalos said people in other states had started to associate ISU with intelligent design because of Gonzalez, so faculty members wanted to be sure they cleared the school’s record from mixing science and religion.

Gonzalez has appealed the tenure decision, and the ISU president has until June 6 to make a decision.

Despite accusations of being an atheist hard-liner, the Harvard Divinity School-trained Avalos doesn’t dismiss religion as an irrelevant phenomenon.

He said it can be “a force for good or ill,” depending on whether religious communities allow for honest debate about its divisive trends.

Avalos notes also that he’s often invited to speak at churches and has two books out from Christian-affiliated publishers.

“I want people to see some of what you believe may be causing the problem,” he said. “The encouraging thing is, I see churches willing to listen.”