ID founder Phillip Johnson a Catholic convert - who knew?

Well, the person who knows that this is true is the author of a widely noted recent Canadian anti-Christian hatefest called The Armageddon Factor (Random House Canada 2010).

In this screed, McDonald claims that Phillip Johnson is a “convert to Roman Catholicism” (p. 198).

Johnson and his wife - whom I contacted - would be astounded to hear this. The Johnsons are staunch Presbyterians, with no intention whatever of swimming the Tiber.*

By the way, did you know that, as a breathless McDonald asserts, a resurgent Christian right is trying to take over Canada? You didn’t? Well, don’t bother knowing now. Worry about real issues instead.

Unless you think that Baptist ministers flew planes into the World Trade Center, and load up vehicles with explosives, and ...

Others have complained about numerous errors of fact in McDonald’s book. See here, for example, where a Jewish civil rights lawyer comments that she just “makes stuff up”.

Apparently, traditional fact checkers have gone extinct, and we cannot interest the World Wildlife Fund in the problem.

Here’s a review that carefully sidesteps the issue: McDonald is an anti-Christian bigot with little regard for facts.

More later on what she has to say about me, mostly erroneous.

Don’t buy the book. You would just be putting more errors of fact and nonsense in circulation, helping the post-modern cult of “I am entitled to my own facts, even in situations that are not even under dispute.”

* becoming Roman Catholics

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Intelligent design: What is the controversy about?

In Touchstone magazine, intelligent design "godfather" Phillip Johnson, a retired Berkeley law prof, writes,

The controversy over evolution is at bottom not a dispute about evidence, but a dispute about whether words like “evolution” should be defined precisely and used consistently, and about whether a scientific conclusion is indisputably correct if it is endorsed by a consensus of contemporary scientific authorities. That is why I thought it appropriate for a law professor to take a professional interest in biological evolution, since lawyers are trained to insist that terms in a legal document be precisely defined, and are taught to check any consensus judgment of experts against the primary evidence.

Examples of vague or slippery definitions and appeals to the authority of consensus abound in writings about evolution, especially those writings that urge potentially skeptical people to trust the experts, rather than to examine the evidence for themselves.

For the rest, go here.

Funny thing, when I was young they used to tell me that science depended on evidence, not on a consensus of learned heads. I was regularly regaled with tales about how the mammals beat the dinosaurs because we were smarter than them, and Galileo beat the Church because ... and then I grew up ...

Note: Touchstone belongs to the same stable as Salvo, sponsored by the Fellowship of St. James. I write a regular column for Salvo.

What if the Dover School board had just put an alternative text in the library?

With respect to the Dover school board's case in general, intelligent design's godfather Phillip Johnson, transcribed here, muses in a recent note,

The Dover board could have placed the ID book in the library, and merely posted a notice that the book was available for any who wanted to know about a different view of the subject. In that case there would probably have been no teacher rebellion, no community commotion, no ACLU lawsuit, and no media circus.

However, that would not have satisfied the enthusiasts on the school board, who thought they had profound thoughts to express, or the lawyer, who wanted to win a test case. If the ACLU hd sued to remove a book from the library, the media might have looked at the case outside the "inherit the Wind" stereotype. It is always self-defeating for local citizens or school board members to write a disclaimer. It just sets up a target.

Johnson's alternative scenario will be easy to test.

The Design of Life, a supplemental textbook that critiques the hype of textbook Darwinism, is about to be released by the same Foundation that published Pandas (the book at the origin of the Dover suit). The official rollout is Monday, November 19.

Will TDOL's placement in school or public libraries trigger lawsuits? Will students be prevented from bringing personal copies to school? To mention anything they learned from the book to anyone on school property? We shall see ...

Right now, Darwinism is the Enron of biology and it is hard to imagine its proponents wanting the books balanced now or ever. So their cause is urgent.

Incidentally, political theorist Paul Marshall (Hudson Institute) told me in a recent note that European secularism in particular is assuming the character of Turkish secularism - that is, not only dogmatic but coercive. If that spreads to North America, I would not be surprised if there is a general purge of non-materialist books and ideas of all kinds and all degrees of merit from the education system, under the Orwellian guise of "avoiding conflict" or "equality" or "human rights" or some such.

What an interesting confluence of cultural events that would be!: Materialist atheism becomes the de facto religion of a school system supported by taxation of a population that overwhelmingly rejects it. Mind you, if the people choose to put up with that, it is their own fault.

Note: I will have more to say about the textbook later. I have seen the published version.

Phillip Johnson on the recent PBS Nova program on the Dover Trial - partial transcript

A friend was kind enough to provide a partial transcript of a podcast of ID lawyer Phillip Johnson talking about the recent PBS Nova episode on the Dover Trial. The interviewer is Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute.

Here are points I thought particularly salient:

Johnson: ... What's going on here is a process of soothing. The scientific establishment has decided that the way to get a reluctant American public to put aside their doubts and believe what they're being told in the mass media, and in the textbooks, and in the museums about evolution is absolutely true is to reassure them that it doesn't threaten [their] religion. Then after they have been talked into accepting the theory, then the types like Richard Dawkins will come out and say, "Well actually now that you've accepted it, we have to tell you that it does destroy your religion."

Luskin: And all this raises a question that I would be very interested in your answer in Professor Johnson, because you have followed this debate for many years. You're aware that for decades the scientific community has been issuing statements to the effect of science and religion do not conflict. They may even say they're totally different spheres that can't even conflict in principle. And yet public skepticism of evolution remains very high. What does this say to you? Why are these attempts to, as you put it, soothe religious people regarding evolution, really seems like it is failing (at least) the public that is largely religious and is still very skeptical.

Johnson: Yes, they are still very skeptical, and they don't believe the reassurances. They know in fact what's going on. The fact is that the public is not as stupid as the experts wish them to be.

Um, no.

Here's the whole of my friend's partial transcript:

Luskin: We can get a little bit of a sneak preview as to what this documentary is going to be about because they have actually been sending out briefing packets to teachers all around the country in public schools regarding how to deal with teaching evolution in schools. And, it's a very one-sided briefing packet (I've read through it) and it very much promotes the view that intelligent design is a religious view, that's not science and so forth. And of course as you said, this is the party line, and this is not too unexpected for them to be taking the party line. What was concerning was when they recommended in the teacher's guide that teachers basically inject religion into the science classrooms by discussing religious denominations that accept evolution. I would like to just read a brief excerpt from the briefing packet to you, Professor Johnson, and get your reaction to it for our listeners. The question asks, "Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion?" And the answer goes on to say in part, "Yes, the common view that evolution is inherently anti-religious is simply false." And then later on it goes on to give various examples of religious denominations that accept evolution, and of course there is no mention of any religious views that might be skeptical of evolution in this briefing packet. So I guess my question for you is, of course, these people are entitled to whatever view they want as far as if religion conflicts with evolution, and of course, many religious people find no conflict with evolution. But, when they are recommending that public school teachers teach this sort of a view in the science classrooms for instance, does that raise any legal troubles in your mind?

Johnson: Well it raises legal troubles if you want to see them. The problem is that some our federal judges like Judge Jones in this program have decided to take on a role of protecting the science establishment from criticism of their most sacred doctrine. And so they don't want to see any legal problems and they won't. What one sees in this kind of approach is that when you teach evolution in the schools, you are bringing religious issues into the classroom, because when you're talking about how all forms of life came into existence, or God created, that is a religious issue. And if you say it was by unintelligent material forces only and God had nothing to do with it, which is the party line in the evolutionary science world, that is their consistent position, the fact that they're putting out a pamphlet with a statement like that just illustrates that when you're teaching evolution in the public schools, and you're teaching Darwinian evolution and the official line of the evolutionary science community, you're teaching religious questions. You're getting into those and then you have to sort out good religion from bad religion, which is what they're doing. They want to talk about the denominations that accept the evolutionary story that they're saying, that's good religion, that's the clear implication of what they're saying.

Luskin: True.

Johnson: So it could involve a legal issue I would think, yes, if you want to see it. If you try to get that in front of Judge Jones and get him to see the legal issue, he's not going to see it because he doesn't want to see it.

Luskin: And of course the briefing packet is actually following Judge Jones' approach quite closely. Judge Jones ruled that it was "utterly false" to say that religion conflicts with evolution and so forth. So…

Johnson: Legal question or not, that's very misleading language. That's why I object to it mainly is [because] it's misleading. What would be more accurate to say is that there is a dispute about whether the theory of evolution implies the non-existence of God as a creator. It's a matter that's in dispute, not something that is obviously settled the way that Judge Jones and the scientific establishment have decided that it ought to be settled. And in fact, one of the phenomenon that's in the news today, is that there is a big surge, just as we have a surge of troops in Iraq, there is a surge of scientific atheism in the scientific community. It is headed by Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor, who is the world's most prominent promoter of Darwinism, and also the world's most prominent promoter of atheism. Now if you ask Dawkins whether the Darwinian theory implies atheism, he's not going to answer "No," he's not going to answer like Judge Jones and the pamphlets you're quoting answer. So, it's no coincidence that the world's most prominent Darwinist is also the world's most prominent promoter of atheism. It's true that there are other people who take a different implication from Darwinism. People like Francis Collins, the head of the US government's human genome project. Collins is an outspoken evangelical Christian who says there's no conflict between Darwinian evolution and his religion. Collins is much publicized for this view, but when you read a news story about Collins, or a review of his book it will generally point out how remarkable a thing it is that Collins doesn't see a conflict between the scientific theory he is endorsing and his religious position. He is an exception. He's a remarkable person. So it's in dispute. It isn't clear. It isn't that everybody agrees that Darwinism does lead to atheism, or that it doesn't. There is a dispute about that matter. That makes it an important religious question. An accurate statement would be telling the students that the connection between Darwinism and atheism is in dispute. Not that it's been settled, that there's no connection. So, this is very typical that information is put out by the Darwinian establishment and its allies that is very seriously misleading. And then this is presented as absolute truth to the students in the schools, with that official endorsement. So, the students are being taught very misleading information, even outright lies. What's going on here is a process of soothing. The scientific establishment has decided that the way to get a reluctant American public to put aside their doubts and believe what they're being told in the mass media, and in the textbooks, and in the museums about evolution is absolutely true is to reassure them that it doesn't threaten [their] religion. Then after they have been talked into accepting the theory, then the types like Richard Dawkins will come out and say, "Well actually now that you've accepted it, we have to tell you that it does destroy your religion."

Luskin: (Laughs.)

Johnson: That's the one-two punch. First you soothe them into accepting something, then you hit them with the other shoe. These kinds of statements and materials that come out cannot be trusted. They are not honest. They attempt to give a very one-sided and hence misleading description of the situation. Many parents understand this and this is why they're so upset with what the schools are doing. These things get into the media and the reporters will ask the official scientific organizations for what they should print about it, and they'll say "Oh these people are religious fanatics that were completely unreasonable because they're seeing something we don't want them to see."

Luskin: And all this raises a question that I would be very interested in your answer in Professor Johnson, because you have followed this debate for many years. You're aware that for decades the scientific community has been issuing statements to the effect of science and religion do not conflict. They may even say they're totally different spheres that can't even conflict in principle. And yet public skepticism of evolution remains very high. What does this say to you? Why are these attempts to, as you put it, soothe religious people regarding evolution, really seems like it is failing (at least) the public that is largely religious and is still very skeptical.

Johnson: Yes, they are still very skeptical, and they don't believe the reassurances. They know in fact what's going on. The fact is that the public is not as stupid as the experts wish them to be.

Luskin: And do you think also that there are scientific doubts that the public has?

Johnson: Yes, there are. The public knows that the theory of evolution can be demonstrated or tested by experiment only at a relatively trivial level. When you ask an evolutionary scientist to come up with an example of how their theory has been demonstrated, they'll always come back to the same examples of things like insect populations becoming resistant to insecticides. They don't have any examples of insects changing into something fundamentally different as they would have to be able to do if the theory is true in a general way. So the situation that the public realizes is that evolution can be demonstrated or tested scientifically only at the trivial level of what's often called microevolution. Microevolution isn't really evolution at all. A better term for it would be adaptive variation. You do see some minor changes going on in populations or species. You do not see one kind of plant or animal evolving into something fundamentally different. The public knows this. They know something is being sold to them that's kind of like the way used cars are sometimes sold.

Luskin: Well, Professor Phillip Johnson, it has been wonderful having you on our show. This has been very enlightening. Thank you very much for sharing your insights with us today.

In the past, Johnson has referred to the strategy described above as the "two-platoon strategy". The first platoon, including various Jesus-hollering biology profs, assures people that mud-to-mind reasoning poses no threat to their faith. Once they have swallowed the bait, ... well if it does destroy their faith, they’re stuck with it now. Haw haw.

ID Godfather's thoughts on creationist students

Following up our discussion of the Creationist Museum here and here, Phillip Johnson wrote an interesting reflection on how an astronomy professor who accepts conventional dating for the age of the universe addresses the apparently substantial number of young earth creationists in his class:

Saperstein [the astronomy prof] concludes that, if very many students remain biblical literalists despite having had a scientific education, he fears for their future, the future of American science, and the future of an American society beset by problems amenable to scientific solutions. He does not explain why knowledge of how the world works now is not sufficient for a science that aspires to solve the problems that beset us. Perhaps our society is more in need of a sound spiritual grounding than of theories about the distant past that cannot be tested by observation or experiment.
I have observed that anti-Darwinist inclinations are fairly common among engineers, for example, who are the scientists most directly concerned with society’s practical problems. But creationists can also be found even among evolutionary biologists and paleontologists, whose theoretical work directly involves the more speculative historical subjects that arouse skepticism in Saperstein’s students.

Johnson also warns,

Alvin Saperstein is also a decent man who is trying to understand his students and reason with them rather than dictate to them. But he had better be careful, because persuasion can work in either direction. I know one senior professor, author of an influential book advocating a naturalistic, chemical evolutionary scenario for the origin of life, who was persuaded by his students that his theory was wrong and that life was intelligently designed. He got into a lot of trouble with zealous colleagues and administrators when he began expressing his doubts about his previous assumptions in his classes.

By the way, did you notice Johnson's "Leading Edge" column's masthead? Yes, that's it, all right - it's the infamous Wedge, and yes, Johnson is the indeed Godfather of the ID theorists.

In reality, of course, Johnson - a constitutional lawyer - was the guy who showed a bunch of isolated scientists how to make their case to a broader world, no matter how colleagues tried to stifle them. That was, as he himself said, a lawyer's contribution. His Darwin on Trial rocketed into the big time when it was denounced by rote in all the science journals.

DoT was probably the book that established the pattern: Publish a good case and use the negative energy of the denunciations by Darwinists/materialist atheists/religious fellow travellers to make up for the deficit in positive financial resources. The book remains a classic, and the strategy has not so far failed. That isn't surprising either - the screaming you hear from Darwinists is genuine frustration; they can't help but go along with it.

It was purely a stroke of luck for the ID theorists that conspirazoids later got hold of "the Wedge document" and sent half the Darwinists' forces down an irrelevant rabbit trail - obscuring the actual, highly effective strategy with rampant speculation about libertarian theocracies and such.

Surely Disco (the ID guys' think tank) did not offer it to the Darwinists as sucker bait? I refuse to allow my mind to go there. No! No! O, but the perfidy of the world ... Okay, okay, let's consider it. Possible? Yes. But likely? No.

No, the Wedge document just happened, and guaranteed Disco and the ID theorists still more exposure - at the cost of putting out a few more brushfires now and then. But so far as I can see, Disco was only ever in trouble with the materialists and their fellow travellers over that one, not with any significant number of people who think intelligent design is worth considering. That, of course, is why it never did the damage Disco's enemies were hoping for.

Why did anyone ever believe Darwinism?

While we're here, Phillip Johnson, the California law prof who put intelligent design on the intellectual map, asks in Think, the Royal Institute of Philosophy's publication, why did anyone ever believe in mud to mind, molecules to man, and other theories of unintelligent design:

Nowadays I rarely see any attempt to prove that the Darwinian mechanism actually has the power to create major new biological innovations. Instead, the museums and magazines prefer just to tell the story of common descent, assuming that random variation with natural selection (differential reproduction) must have been adequate to perform whatever designing had to be done. At the same time, mainstream science, although guided by Darwinian assumptions, keeps providing more and more evidence of the enormous information content of living structures. Even the core assumption that genetic similarities are necessarily inherited from common ancestors is contradicted almost daily by invocations of something called “lateral gene transfer” to explain genetic similarities between organisms which are not believed to share a recent common ancestor. Today authoritarian rules ban the hypothesis of intelligent design from scientific discussion and fiercely suppress it by lawsuits. A genuinely confident scientific culture that was making continual progress in confirming its theories and solving problems would not need or want to rely on intimidation to silence dissent. It may require many long years of struggle before the hypothesis of real design in biology will be able to receive a fair hearing, but the day of that fair hearing will arrive, and eventually people may wonder how a materialist theory as shaky as Darwinism was able to captivate so many minds for so long.

Well, one may as well ask, why did Freudianism capture the public for so long? One reason is that when third-raters proffer unfalsifiable explanations - without themselves having the least sense that they might not be proferring wisdom - they can sound very, very convincing. They act as thought they have discovered the source of truth, and the unwary believe them.

The Freudian honestly believed that your behaviour as a mid-life adult can be entirely traced to early childhood traumas, and challenged you to prove otherwise. In the same way, the Darwinist honestly believes that creativity can be had for free without intelligence, and can't imagine otherwise, despite the evidence. Not only that but - zealous as he is for the cause - he knows it is his duty to persecute any who doubt.

Johnson's comments on the hype surrounding the Galapagos finches are interesting in this context.

Insightful Washington Post profile of intelligent design founder Phillip Johnson (must-read!)

Amazingly, this Washington Post story avoids the cliches and the Darwinist super-yes-men, and talks about some of the real issues behind the intelligent design controversy, in a profile of Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, who did more than anyone else to force the issues into the open:

“Phillip is absolutely right that the evidence for the big transformations in evolution are not there in the fossil record -- it's always good to point this out,” Provine says. “It's difficult to explore a billion-year-old fossil record. Be patient!”

Provine's faith, if one may call it that, rests on Darwinism, which he describes as the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. The English scientist's insights registered as a powerful blow -- perhaps the decisive one -- in the long run of battles, from Copernicus to Descartes, that removed God from the center of the Western world.

“Give Johnson and the intelligent-design movement their due -- they are asking terribly important questions," says Stuart A. Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity at the University of Calgary. “ To question whether patterns and complexity, at the level of the cell or the universe, bespeak intelligent design is not stupid in the least.

“I simply believe they've come up with the wrong answers.”

Wow, an intelligent discussion in a national newspaper, of all places!

Here are some excerpts from a letter I wrote, thanking journalist Michael Powell:

As one who spent three years researching and writing a book on the intelligent design controversy (By Design or by Chance? Augsburg Fortress, 2004), I was impressed with your willingness to actually look at the issues the ID folk raise.

...

Michael, your signal achievement, in my view, is to get PAST the idea that the best way to understand the ID controversy is to hear what the detractors of the ID folk say and then print that as if it is some sort of satisfying truth.

Not so. The issues are much bigger than the detractors of the ID guys, or even the ID guys themselves. Those ID guys could well perpetrate a tragedy they don't even understand, by promoting a materialistic conception of God (even if they don't intend to - witness the law of unintended consequences).

But who knows? Generally, you will find, the ID guys are a much more interesting lot than their professional detractors, who - in my experience, tend to be super-yes-men, promoting establishment thinking that is actually quite unsound at many points, but the super-yes-men are the last to know. They are certainly not my favourite type, anyway, when I am looking for a really good story, which is why I find the dependence of so many journalists on the Darwinist super-yes-men so much less than praiseworthy.

Find out more about my book, go to By Design or by Chance?