Johnson Challenges Advocates of Evolution

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

The experience of having marriage and family life crash under me, and of achieving a certain amount of academic success and seeing the meaninglessness of it, made me listen and give myself to Christ at the advanced age of 38. And that aroused a particular level of intellectual interest in the question of why the intellectual world is so dominated by naturalistic and agnostic thinking.

Insight: Why is the intellectual world so attracted to naturalism and agnosticism?

PJ: It follows along on my own experience of the intellectual arrogance that comes naturally to an academic winner, an academic gold-medal winner such as myself. Scientific naturalism is a thing that's attractive to that sort of people because it says that the secular intellectuals are the people to whom the world should look for all wisdom.

The secular intellectuals become the priesthood. Their cultural story dominates. It feeds their sense that they have a wisdom the masses don't have. Naturalism is their vehicle to replace the [religious] clergy with the scientific and intellectual professionals, the priesthood being the people who tell a society its creation story, and in this case the creation story being the naturalistic one.

Insight: So challenging the evidence for Darwinian evolution isn't merely an intellectual challenge, it's attacking the scientific and intellectual elite on the very points they believe distinguish them from the average man, their superior knowledge about how the world works, their superior wisdom?

PJ: Sometimes I put that point this way. Suppose you really want to be dogmatic. You lay down the law with no back talk allowed. Well, if you're a Christian fundamentalist, there's an inherent limitation on your ability to be dogmatic: You might be able to do that with your own flock, but of course they listen to the radio, they watch television -- and those outside authorities creep into your world, and they have to be taken into consideration because they, too, are governing authorities. This is a check on any desire to be dogmatic that you might have.

But if you're a member of the scientific elite, you can go much further. You can indulge your passion for dogmatism much more completely because you never meet anyone who thinks differently from you that you have to take seriously.

So, honestly, if you want to see real dogmatism unrestrained, you must go to the higher reaches of the academic world and the scientific profession because the natural checks on dogmatism aren't there. Now, you're aware that out there in the culture there are people who are thinking differently than you, but they're not authority figures, they don't have any authority over you, so you don't have to take them seriously if you're in the higher reaches of the academic world and the scientific profession.

Personal Bio

Currently: Professor of law, University of California at Berkeley; author of books challenging Darwinian evolution and naturalistic philosophy.

Born: June 18, 1940; Aurora, Ill.

Family: Wife, Kathie; three children. Member, First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, Calif.