scientists & creationists

This continues my recent thoughts about jobs and intellectual culture.

There is a front page article in the New York Times today about a creationist scientist who has recently finished his doctoral work in geosciences from U of Rhode Island. The catcher is that he doesn’t really believe in the work that he did. The way he describes it, he was working from a certain scientific paradigm; he can just as easily switch paradigms to Christian one and get very different results.
Basically from what I gathered from the article is that he is working the system. Playing the game to get a certain accreditation to back up his creationist work later on–he is now teaching at Jerry Falwell’s college. This is a pretty interesting case, which from the article seems to be normal situation for many Christian scientists these days.
So they write a dissertation holding evolution to be true to get a degree while they don’t really believe what they write. I don’t really know if I can think of this as being ethical. This would seem relate to people working for companies doing jobs they don’t agree with. Recently a friend and I have talked back and forth on his blog about his current work situation which directly relates to this.