Johnson Challenges Advocates of Evolution

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 25, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

Law professor Phillip Johnson is a legal philosopher whose books on Darwinian speculation have shaken the liberal establishment and embarrassed doctrinaire naturalism.

On a Sunday evening in September more than 700 people poured into the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington to hear Phillip Johnson challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy that dominates thinking in the world of science. The speaker is a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, but what brought the crowd to church that night- Johnson regularly attracts such attention -- wasn't his legal expertise but the series of books he's published since 1991's Darwin on Trial attacking evolutionary theory.

Johnson accepts microevolution, the changes that take place in living organisms that make possible horse breeding or that cause bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. But he calls macroevolution -- the notion that species change over time to become other species (that reptiles developed feathers, becoming birds, for example) -- pure speculation on the part of scientists.

What disturbs Johnson most deeply about current evolutionary theory is that it assumes God isn't necessary to explain existence and that nature alone is sufficient to explain how we (and the universe) came into being. This "naturalistic" approach to scientific knowledge Johnson deems intellectually dishonest because it begins by saying only nature itself can produce natural things -- and only after it asserts that proposition does it add: Therefore, God isn't necessary to explain how things came into being. Insight sat down with Johnson the morning after his Washington talk.

Insight: You became seriously interested in Darwinism on a 1987-88 sabbatical in London?

Phillip Johnson: I was generally aware of evolutionary science and curious about it. It just so happened that on the way from the bus stop to my office at University College in London was a scientific bookstore and in the window was [prominent British Darwinist] Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker. It was new at the time, and I gradually picked up one book and then another about evolution.

I became fascinated with the whole subject. I saw that it purports to be a scientific theory. It is that, but it's also something that is broader. Evolution is a creation story -- and as a creation story, it's the main prop of the materialist explanation for our existence. It gives the biological history on how you get life, the part that materialists found unsolvable before Darwin.

So Darwin came along and gave this creation story with all of these interesting consequences. Before Darwin, for instance, there were atheists. They were a marginalized group. After the triumph of Darwinism, you have the invention of the word "agnostic" by Darwin's disciple T.H. Huxley, who described the agnostic view as one that says you can get knowledge from science, but you can't get knowledge of God that way, so God is something we inherently can know nothing about -- so there's no point in talking about the poor fellow.

Agnosticism is a more effective dismissal of God than atheism. The atheist raises the issue by saying that God does not exist. But the agnostic very simply has nothing to say on the subject, so you don't discuss it.

If you have a biblical creation story, then getting the right relationship with God and getting to heaven are the most important things. If you throw that overboard and you have a naturalistic creation story, those things become unimportant and what becomes important is how we apply scientific knowledge to make a heaven here on earth. That's a dream of various kinds of reform programs -- socialism, for example.

Insight: How did you, a professor of criminal law, master the science necessary to debate the Darwinists?

PJ: Naturally, I get asked all the time, "How can you do this when you're not a scientist?" The answer is that it is not mainly about science. It is about a certain way of thinking.

The science part of it is easy to learn. It's very repetitive. All the books cite the same examples: the fossil examples, the genetic examples and so on. A relative handful of them is used over and over. So a Darwinist will look at the evidence of finch-beak variation [the beaks of finches on the Galapagos Islands have been found to vary in average size between periods of drought and periods of plenty] and say, "This shows Darwinian natural selection affecting a species. Doesn't that mean that given enough time and the right circumstances a species can evolve into another species?"

But the theist will step back and say, "All I see in the variation of finch beaks is a trivial variation within one type [of bird] and can find no creative power there at work at all. You don't give me any reason to think that variation can create a new species, that you don't have a need for a preexisting supernatural power to do the creating."

So my point is that what carries the whole project is not the scientific evidence. What carries the whole project is the philosophy of naturalism which says that nature had to have the resources to do its own creating, and the only question that we plausibly can ask is, "What is the specific path that nature took to be able to do its own creating?" If that really is the only question, then the Darwinian answer or the neo-Darwinian synthesis of today is the only plausible answer.