Should employers be blind to private beliefs? (Richard Dawkins)

A good scientist should be agnostic. In some ways, believing something accepted to be false in the scientific community is preferable to actually believing what is accepted to be true in the scientific community. If everyone starts with the same assumptions then the same assumptions are propagated through the literature without critical analysis.

And sometimes, it may even be worthwhile to look at Mars with the eye of someone who believes it to be a giant purple mongoose. So long as in your work you recognize and promote the most likely possibilities, what you believe to be true regardless of evidence is, at worst, a tool that can aid one in thinking outside the box.

Personally I believe the universe and the Earth are many times over older than 10000 years. The evidence is so overwhelming it's hard to understand anyone who thinks otherwise. But I feel like the person who believes the Earth is 10000 years old is a better scientist than the person who knows it to be an incontrovertible fact that the Earth is much older than 10000 years.

One might also interpret the phrase "object to employing him" as being about a reluctance to let him through the selection process as a new hire (which is the context set by the question raised in the case of Martin Gaskell). In other words, it doesn't have to mean that Dawkins would have an employee terminated on those grounds. Since Dawkins isn't here to comment on that distinction, it's not fair to put the question of firing in the headline when it's not explicitly discussed in the article.

There's too much grey to make this black and white. What would you say to a closeted gay politician pushing anti-gay legislation? Would you not consider that person a fraud, just like someone saying their research is based on the universe being 13 billion years old when they don't really believe that?

That's a very good question. If you haven't done so already, may I suggest reading the book Kicking the Sacred Cow by James Hogan. He deals with this question all throughout his book.

  Even if a doctor's belief in the stork theory of
  reproduction is technically irrelevant to his competence
  as an eye surgeon, it tells you something about him. It
  is revealing. It is relevant in a general way to whether
  we would wish him to treat us or teach us. A patient
  could reasonably shrink from entrusting her eyes to a
  doctor whose beliefs (admittedly in the apparently
  unrelated field of obstetrics) are so cataclysmically
  disconnected from reality.

This statement seems to work when applied to something like "babies come from storks", but it generalizes poorly. There are simply too many incorrect beliefs floating around; it's difficult to find someone who has resisted all of them. Would you refuse treatment from an ophthalmologist who believed:

1. The seasons are caused by Earth approaching and receding from the Sun?

2. Fixed-wing aircraft fly because air moves over and under the wing at the same rate?

3. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb?

All of these are just as wrong as stork-babies or creationism, and all are just as relevant (ie, not at all) to ophthalmology. I don't demand that my doctor rigorously examine every belief they hold, merely the ones related to surgery. Frankly, a creationist surgeon is much less worrying than a surgeon who believes wi-fi causes cancer.

  My colleague takes the view that this YEC is entitled to a job
  as a professor of astronomy, because he keeps his private
  beliefs to himself while at work. I take the opposite view. I
  would object to employing him, on the grounds that his
  research papers, and his lectures to students, are filled with
  what he personally believes to be falsehoods. He is a fake, a
  fraud, a charlatan, drawing a salary for a job that could have
  gone to an honest astronomer. Moreover, I would regard his
  equanimity in holding two diametrically opposing views
  simultaneously in his head as a revealing indicator that there
  is something wrong with his head. 

There's an idiom that goes something like "reality is what keeps happening even if you don't believe in it". If a creationist is able to perform correct science, I see no reason to dismiss it out of hand. Especially considering the wide variety of creationist beliefs now extant in the US -- even if he believes Earth was created six thousand years ago, he may be willing to concede that the Universe is roughly fourteen billion years old.