Phillip E. Johnson

Phillip E. Johnson (born 1940) is a retired American law professor and author. He is considered the father of the intelligent design movement, which criticizes the theory of evolution, and promotes creationism as an alternative. Johnson has also participated in a movement challenging the scientific orthodoxy that HIV is the cause of AIDS.[1]

1 Biography
2 Ideas
3 Criticisms
4 Bibliography
5 External links

Biography

The cover of the book shows Charles Darwin

Johnson was born in Aurora, Illinois in 1940. He received a BA degree in English literature, from Harvard University in 1961. He studied law at the University of Chicago. He served as a law clerk for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Earl Warren. He is an emeritus professor of law at Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, where he served on the active faculty from 1967–2000.

Despite the fact that he has no formal background in the biological sciences, Johnson has become a prominent critic of evolutionary theory. Johnson popularized the term "intelligent design" in its current sense in his 1991 book, Darwin on Trial, and he remains one of the best known advocates for the intelligent design movement.

He is a critic of naturalism, and espouses a philosophy for which he has coined the term theistic realism. He is the author of several books on intelligent design and related topics, as well as textbooks on criminal law.

Johnson is a Christian and elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Ideas

Intelligent Design

Johnson is probably best known for his involvement in the Intelligent design movement and the Discovery Institute, which challenge the theory of biological evolution and assert that irreducible complexity and specified complexity are scientific evidence that life was deliberately designed. He advocated these ideas through his books Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance. The goal of the Discovery institute is to perform research into intelligent design, to provide a scientific and philosophical basis for theistic belief in contemporary society.

Evolution and intelligent design in public education

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Phillip E. Johnson set forth part of the philosophical basis for the teaching policy. He made the following observations about public education, the definition of science, and the scientific establishment:

"The root of the problem is that "science" has two distinct definitions in our culture. On the one hand, science refers to a method of investigation involving things like careful measurements, repeatable experiments, and especially a skeptical, open-minded attitude that insists that all claims be carefully tested. Science also has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. . . . Students are not supposed to approach this philosophy with open-minded skepticism, but to believe it on faith....[2]

He notes that science and science education are not always driven by a priori philosophical and religious neutrality:

All the most prominent Darwinists proclaim naturalistic philosophy when they think it safe to do so. Carl Sagan had nothing but contempt for those who deny that humans and all other species "arose by blind physical and chemical forces over eons from slime." Richard Dawkins exults that Darwin "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist," and Richard Lewontin has written that scientists must stick to philosophical materialism regardless of the evidence, because "we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.... [3]

Johnson advocates a policy of Teach the Controversy, a movement which advocates teaching scientific evidence which supports and challenges evolution in public schools, and allow students the opportunity to consider the facts for themselves, to foster critical thinking.

He writes:

If the Academy meant to teach scientific investigation, rather than to inculcate a belief system, it would encourage students to think about why, if natural selection has been continuously active in creating, the observed examples involve very limited back-and-forth variation that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But skepticism of that kind might spread and threaten the whole system of naturalistic belief. Why is the fossil record overall so difficult to reconcile with the steady process of gradual transformation predicted by the neo-Darwinian theory? How would the theory fare if we did not assume at the start that nature had to do its own creating, so a naturalistic creation mechanism simply has to exist regardless of the evidence? These are the kinds of questions the Darwinists don't want to encourage students to ask....

This doesn't mean that students in Kansas or elsewhere shouldn't be taught about evolution. In context, the Kansas action was a protest against enshrining a particular worldview as a scientific fact and against making "evolution" an exception to the usual American tradition that the people have a right to disagree with the experts. Take evolution away from the worldview promoters and return it to the real scientific investigators, and a chronic social conflict will become an exciting intellectual adventure."[4]

Advocacy of Christianity outside public schools

In addition to his limited goals for public education, Johnson also speaks widely in Christian circles on topics of apologetics and evangelism. Johnson believes that honest examination of the facts will lead unbiased observers to Christian truth. He argues as strongly against 'indoctrination' of atheists to turn them into Christians, and against the suppression of scientific facts and arguments that appear to run counter to Christian teaching An example of this thinking is apparent when Johnson told an assembly at a fundamentalist Christian conference entitled, Reclaiming America For Christ:

"The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to the truth of the Bible and then the question of sin and finally introduced to Jesus." [5]

In speaking to the audience of the Christian media group and church, Coral Ridge Ministries, [6], Johnson expanded on his views on education:

"In summary, we have to educate our young people; we have to give them the armor they need. We have to think about how we're going on the offensive rather than staying on the defensive. And above all, we have to come out to the culture with the view that we are the ones who really stand for freedom of thought. You see, we don't have to fear freedom of thought because good thinking done in the right way will eventually lead back to the Church, to the truth-the truth that sets people free, even if it goes through a couple of detours on the way. And so we're the ones that stand for good science, objective reasoning, assumptions on the table, a high level of education, and freedom of conscience to think as we are capable of thinking. That's what America stands for, and that's something we stand for, and that's something the Christian Church and the Christian Gospel stand for-the truth that makes you free. Let's recapture that, while we're recapturing America." [7]

When speaking to the same audience on a different occasion, Johnson said the following:

"What I am not doing is bringing the Bible into the university and saying, "We should believe this." Bringing the Bible into question works very well when you are talking to a Bible-believing audience. But it is a disastrous thing to do when you are talking, as I am constantly, to a world of people for whom the fact that something is in the Bible is a reason for not believing it."

"You see, if they thought they had good evidence for something, and then they saw it in the Bible, they would begin to doubt. That is what has to be kept out of the argument if you are going to do what I to do, which is to focus on the defects in their [the evolutionist's] casethe bad logic, the bad science, the bad reasoning, and the bad evidence." [8]

HIV and AIDS

In addition to his work on Intelligent design, Johnson is involved in a movement challenging the scientific orthodoxy that HIV is the cause of AIDS.[9] This group asserts, broadly, that there is no scientific evidence that HIV actually causes AIDS, and that while HIV and AIDS are correlated, they are not universally correllated, as (it is argued) there are people who have AIDS symptoms without HIV and people with HIV who have no AIDS symptoms. They argue that correlative statistics are misleading, because AIDS is defined by the presence of the HIV virus, so that a person with tuberculosis and HIV has AIDS, but a person with Tuberculosis but without HIV does not have AIDS. One researcher for the organization reported finding over 4,000 cases in which AIDS symptoms were suffered without HIV, but these cases were not counted as AIDS because the HIV virus was absent. Since, they argue, there is no known mechanism of causation nor is there a perfect correlation, they conclude that the cause of AIDS is as yet unknown.[10]

Criticisms

The concept and phrase "teach the controversy" was first presented publicly in Phillip E. Johnson's book "The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism" [11] published in 2000. Proponents consider this 'wedge' to be the one that breaks the wall preventing any challenge to the scientific orthodoxy of current evolutionary thinking; his opponents consider it a wedge that is designed to bring fundamential Christian beliefs about creationism into American public school science classrooms. Johnson himself spoke on the matter:

"We are taking an intuition most people have (the belief in God) and making it a scientific and academic enterprise. We are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator." (Johnson, Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator, The Los Angeles Times, 25 March 2001)

Critics of both Johnson and the Teach the Controversy movement argue that the "Teach the Controversy" exhortation is disingenuous, because they claim that the theory of evolution is well supported and widely accepted within the scientific community, and therefore there is little controversy on a scientific level. Popular disagreement with evolutionary theory should not be considered as a reason for challenging the status quo, they contend.

Bibliography

Darwin on Trial ISBN 0–83–081324–1
Reason in the Balance ISBN 0–83–081929–0
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds ISBN 0–83–081360–8
The Wedge of Truth ISBN 0–83–082267–4
Objections Sustained ISBN 0–83–082288–7
The Right Questions ISBN 0–83–082294–1
Darwinism: Science or Philosophy? ISBN 0–96–421040–1

External links

Johnson's sites

HIV and AIDS

Anti-creationist sites

Audio and Video

There several interrelated articles on Wikipedia about this subject, see: Teach the Controversy; Wedge strategy; Discovery Institute; Howard Ahmanson, Jr