ARTICLES

Calling the Darwinists' Bluff

UC BERKELEY LAW PROFESSOR PHILLIP JOHNSON

By John Dunlap

When he was in London on a sabbatical during the 1987/88 school year, UC Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson strolled into a bookshop and started browsing through a large collection of Darwinian literature. Out of curiosity, he bought a copy of The Blind Watchmaker (1986), which had recently been published by evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, a militant atheist.

For Johnson, the Dawkins book was an eye-opener in ways unintended by the author. "I could see that Dawkins achieved his word magic with the very tools that are familiar to us lawyers. [Dawkins was] deciding everything on the definitions.... If you take as a starting point that there's no creator, then something more or less like Darwinism has to be true as a matter of definition."

Fascinated, Johnson immersed himself in the vast literature on evolutionary theory. In 1991 he published Darwin on Trial, a carefully reasoned dissection of the flimsy evidence supporting Darwinism. Although ignored by most of the popular media, the book was widely -- and in most cases hostilely -- reviewed in the scientific press.

In a second edition, published in 1993, Johnson added a lengthy reply to his critics. "The philosophically important part of the Darwinian theory," he wrote, "...is a deduction from naturalistic philosophy. In brief, what makes me a 'critic of evolution' is that I distinguish between naturalistic philosophy and empirical science, and oppose the former when it comes cloaked in the authority of the latter."

Johnson pursued this theme in his next book, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education (1995). In 1997 he published a more accessible treatment aimed at high school and college students, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. The two previous books had been "heavy going" for many readers, and "I wanted to write for late teens -- high school juniors and seniors and beginning college undergraduates, along with the parents and teachers of such young people."

Witty and informative, Defeating Darwinism is less a polemic than a thoughtful introduction to intellectual method: how argument works, how to detect "baloney" in human discourse, how metaphysical assumptions direct and condition human thought.

"Textbooks and other educational materials today take evolutionary naturalism for granted, and thus assume the wrong answer to the most important question we face: Is there a God who created us and cares about what we do?"

Johnson strongly believes there is. But he arrived at his own "theistic realism" as an adult. As a precocious teenager back in the 1950s, he felt "sort of hostile to Christianity." His favorite book was Clarence Darrow's autobiography.

"I was a great admirer of the kind of Clarence Darrow/Bertrand Russell pseudo-rationalism. It's the sort of thing that's inherently appealing to immature minds, who want to think they are smarter than anyone else."

At Harvard, though, Johnson had mellowed somewhat. "By that time I would describe myself as a Christian-friendly agnostic." He recalls going to a theater with other Harvard students to see the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized version of the 1925 Scopes evolution trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The town is called "Hillsboro" in the movie, and the citizens are depicted as fundamentalist yahoos.

The student audience "jeered at the rubes of Hillsboro" and "whooped with delight" at the wisecracks of Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly, who play the sophisticated defenders of evolution. "It occurred to me that the Harvard students were reacting much like the worst of the Hillsboro citizens in the movie. They thought they were showing how smart they were by aping the prejudices of their teachers."

Eventually, after attending law school at the University of Chicago and settling into an academic career at Boalt Hall in Berkeley, Johnson was moved by the example of some Presbyterian friends to embrace Christianity. His conversion was in the 1970s, in his mid-thirties, and he turned his attention from criminal law to legal theory. "I took that up as a subject and became active in academic debates about the foundations of law and morality."

So when he strolled into the London bookshop in 1987, Johnson was already primed for the biggest debate of his life. "Actually, it's now clear to me, in retrospect, that [Darwinism] is a perfectly logical subject for a law professor to take up, odd though that may be, because the subject is the relationship between assumptions and proof. It's about the way people assume things and then, for purposes of argument, hide their assumptions."

In his pursuit of the topic, one of the first things Johnson noticed was that "the evolutionary biologists I talked to were incapable of appreciating the difference between what they had assumed and what they had proved. The distinction didn't make any sense to them."

Johnson acknowledges the existence of competing evolutionary theories as well as the differences between aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins and sanguine agnostics like Stephen Jay Gould. But he insists that the various forms of Darwinism are all driven by an underlying premise of naturalism, which consigns any belief in God to the realm of fantasy or, at best, subjectivity.

When the prolific Stephen Jay Gould, for example, writes with apparent theological innocence that "science treats factual reality while religion struggles with human morality," he is serving up what Johnson terms "naturalistic metaphysics in a nutshell."

"The power to define 'factual reality' is the power to govern the mind, and thus to confine 'religion' within a naturalistic box." Gould's implicit metaphysics "relegates both morality and God to the realm outside of scientific knowledge, where only subjective belief is to be found."

To Gould's condescension and indirection, Johnson prefers the up-front atheism of the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin or the Cornell science historian and evolutionary biologist William Provine, who both confirm the naturalistic premise of Darwinism.

"Provine and I have become very friendly adversaries, because our agreement about how to define the question is more important than our disagreement about how to answer it."

Johnson's bitterest critics tend to be among those whom he calls "slow creationists" -- persons "who believe in a God-guided evolutionary process." One such is Howard J. Van Till, a professor of physics at Calvin College.

According to Van Till, Johnson "perpetuates the association of Christian belief with the rejection of scientific theorizing, thereby ensuring that the gulf between the academy and the sanctuary will only grow wider."

Johnson detects a vain accommodationism in objections of that sort, whereby scientists who are still Christian are more anxious to dissociate themselves from fundamentalism and to acquire respectability among secular intellectuals than to look hard at the spotty evidence of Darwinism.

But in their deference to Darwinian theory, Johnson contends, the accommodationists "allow naturalistic categories to define the terms of the debate and thus to control the outcome." The outcome includes a secular culture whose legal and educational systems are steeped in an unreflective naturalist metaphysic. In such a culture, Darwinism is the new "creation myth" -- and any dissent from that myth is instantly treated by the culture's guardians as crankish and fundamentalist.

What Johnson calls "the Inherit the Wind stereotype" (heroic evolutionists defending reason against knee-jerk biblical literalists) has been turned on its head, with the evolutionists now backed by the full power of the law.

By labeling dissent as "religion," the naturalist guardians "are able to ban criticism of the official evolution story from public education far more effectively than the teaching of evolution was banned from Tennessee schools in the 1920s."

Johnson thus believes that there is more at stake in the Darwinian debates than theistic evolutionists are willing or able to see. Against the media hype ("Pope Endorses Evolution!") following Pope John Paul II's 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences regarding evolutionary theories, Johnson highlights a paragraph of the Pope's address in which the Holy Father explicitly rejects materialist philosophy "as incompatible with the truth about man."

Yet Johnson also suggests that the Pope's statement was "ill-timed" in the present intellectual climate. "The Darwinian conclusions are derived from a materialist starting point," Johnson reiterates -- and the naturalistic scientists themselves do not really accept the Catholic notion that science and theology should be allowed their due competence.

At best, the naturalists who control the terms of debate in the secular culture concede no more to the accommodationists than "a kind of political treaty that leaves the clergy with a job."

Despite his vociferous critics, Johnson's books and tapes (available from Access Research Network, P.O. Box 38069, Colorado Springs 80937) have drawn many allies to his program of defining what is at issue in the creation-evolution controversy.

In academia, Johnson's supporters tend to be philosophers -- Stephen Meyer, Alvin Plantinga, David Berlinski, Dallas Willard -- who regard Darwinism as more of an ideological pose than a scientific theory. Prominent among scientists in Johnson's camp are the geneticist Michael Denton, author of Nature's Destiny, and Lehigh University molecular biologist Michael J. Behe, a Roman Catholic with no specifically religious ax to grind against evolution.

In Darwin's Black Box (1996), Behe objects to Darwinism not on religious grounds but on the basis of the "irreducible complexity" found in molecular mechanisms.

No part of these mechanisms, observes Behe, has a useful function without the presence of all the other parts. Behe argues that there could be no pathway of intermediate stages by which a gradual Darwinian process could fashion such a system. The fantastically interrelated complexity of life at the molecular level smacks of intelligent design.

Against their adversaries, Johnson and his intellectual allies remind us reason builds on a foundation of faith."We all see through a glass darkly," says Johnson, "but what glass should we try to see through?

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