I’m not familiar with the organization(s) but I am with the issues.
If a person is to be considered a scholar of religion he or she must be willing to seriously question the truth of all aspects of it. And to make trustworthy contributions to the body of knowledge he or she must be as objective as possible. I suspect many of the Evangelicals would not be able to or choose to do that and consequently their contributions would be suspect.
Then there’s the question of infighting within the organization and its meetings. I understand when people don’t want someone in their own organization to accuse them of prejudice and ignorance.

There is however a big difference between being open minded, and what I call ‘justification by doubt’ where doubting something is thought to prove you are a critical thinker, which is nonsense. Everyone of course has a point of view. There is no pure objectivity, but one strives to be open minded and fair to all points of view.
BW3

Doubting alone certainly doesn’t prove you are a critical thinker. It is necessary but not sufficient.

How is doubting any different from the distaff side of faith? It’s certainly not objectivity. I would have thought that neither doubting nor believing is the middle ground. It’s called having an open mind. One of the great problems with doubting is it is nearly impossible to prove a negative— e.g. to prove something didn’t happen.

I didn’t say “deny”, I said “doubt”. It seems to me that is having an open mind.

Well no, we will have to disagree on that one. The doubter begins with a negative posture, not an open mind. And its hard to get to somewhere positive when you begin with a negative posture.
BW3

And to me someone who doesn’t doubt starts with an un-objective propensity to believe. So there we are. I’ll see you elsewhere.

I think a good example to explain BW3′s preference in terms of being open-minded is that, in the scientific process, a hypothesis must be a positive statement. In general, I would think that most people would view fields of science as very open-minded and much of this is presumed on the basis of positively constructed hypotheses. The unknown or unreliable data is then tested by these hypotheses. This is because it would be very difficult to prove, for example, that Jesus *didn’t* say something but rather much easier to show that He did. Of course, in this process you might find reliable positives that then rule out or put a lot of doubt on other ideas, but this is all presumed to stem from the creation of reliable positive assertions. Thus the creation of reasonable understanding can be created through positive hypotheses, which is a major presumption of modern science.
Therefore, I would agree with Dr. Ben that open-mindedness would not presume doubt, but rather a willingness to adapt your thinking to data.

Hello!
Have you read the parody Michael Bird wrote some time ago? Quite funny! Check it out: http://euangelizomai.blogspot.com/2008/02/society-of-baseball-literature-parody.html