Johnson Challenges Advocates of Evolution

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

But that actually is what they are saying and it is an absurdity, in my view. In my view, effective science rose out of what effectively are theist premises: God made the world and made our minds so that we can understand the world He made. Our understanding often is dim or distorted. We see through a glass darkly because we're not as God meant us to be.

Insight: Your conversion to Christianity came in your mid-thirties?

PJ: I often say I was raised as a nominal Christian and I graduated from being a nominal Christian to being a nominal agnostic, which is to say that I don't believe I had any absolutely firm convictions.

I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s when religion and churchgoing were part of the American way of life. I went away to Harvard University very young, right after my 17th birthday, and I went away with the attitude: I'm going into the real world now and I'll adopt the thinking of Harvard professors and other leading intellectuals of the culture.

I saw that as my path to worldly success, which is the only kind of success I had any knowledge of or interest in, and I did pretty well in the academic world. I was graduated at the top of my class in the University of Chicago Law School. I was law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren; then I got a professorship at Berkeley, which is extremely attractive in terms of the quality of the university and the quality of the lifestyle of Northern California.

I was married. I had kids, and I thought: "I've got it made; all I have to do is build on this." But, as time went on, I became eventually quite disillusioned in the kind and quality of thinking that was going on in academic life. It seems to me that basically academic life is the business of showing that you're more intelligent than other people by publishing papers hardly anybody reads.

It seemed to me I had a genuine talent but I had wasted it. Then I went through a divorce, a period of single-parenting, and these experiences combined to convince me -- to a large extent, at least -- that people like me were not superior because of our higher rank in the intellectual hierarchy. I began to think this Christian Gospel could be true for me, which is something that before that time I had been unable or unwilling to consider.

Insight: You have lived in two very different worlds, that of the highly esteemed university and that of a committed Christian.

PJ: There's a great cultural divide here. It is the cultural arrogance of intellectuals that I think is one of their big problems. And it's always the case with the Christian Gospel that it is more attractive to people on the bottom of the ladder than to people on the top of the ladder. Paul says in First Corinthians, "Not many of you are wealthy, not many of you are of high rank, not many of you are wise as the world counts wisdom."

That's always been true about Christianity, and that's why the Gospel is often denigrated as slave religion. There's an element of truth in that. It's the slaves who really see this reality, so it is nothing peculiar to me that a person who is intellectually gifted and well rewarded for it would think more highly of himself than he ought to.