If Darwinism Is the Answer, What’s the Question?

Phillip Johnson | Sunday, March 05, 2000
Copyright © 2000, Phillip Johnson

Edited transcript from a lecture sponsored by Grace Valley Christian Center Saturday, March 4, 2000

Faith and Reason Go Together

I was glad to be an invited speaker for this Faith and Reason lecture series, which seeks to bring eminent scientists, logicians and theologians to speak on issues regarding the proper relationship between academic excellence and vital Christian faith. Academic excellence, vital Christian faith-the premise here is that these two go together. But I can tell you what the university’s response to that statement would be: “There is no relationship between academic excellence and vital Christian faith, and to think that there ever could be is a massive misunderstanding; or, if there is a relationship, it is a negative one. Christian faith means superstition clouded in ignorance, and a major job of academic excellence is to free us from such things.” Public schools have much the same view as the university, only they put it a little more tactfully because of the surrounding political background.

The Faith and Reason series prospectus states that “the purpose of this series is to demonstrate that the Christian faith properly defines ultimate reality and does not contradict what can be known about the world by the proper use of either academic or scientific methods.” “Does not contradict” could perhaps be stated even more strongly. It might say: “is actually fully consistent with and even strongly supported by what can be known about the world by the proper use of either academic or scientific methods.”

Again, this is very contrary to what is assumed throughout the university world everywhere to be the truth. The university world is largely defined by its opposition to and separation from those doctrines of the Christian faith. The point is made that the very fact that they are described as faith means that they are non-rational or irrational, and the university is about reason, which is contradictory to faith. Indeed, these are two different ways of understanding the world altogether.

Now, can we make good on this? Can we actually say that the Christian understanding of the world properly defines ultimate reality? I don’t think we can completely address this issue in a single lecture, so I’m not going to try to do that. But certainly this is a good starting point, because it very much defines the starting point that I had when I first began to look at the theory of evolution.

I’m an adult convert to Christ (my late thirties), and I come out of a milieu in which a secular or naturalistic understanding of reality is taken for granted. To put it very simply, either there is something wrong with the thinking of all my colleagues, or there’s something wrong with my thinking. Which is it?

Conflict: “Science -vs- the Bible”

One aspect of that whole problem-who’s being rational, who’s being irrational-is what one might call generally the scientific question or the question of evolution. It is stated throughout the scientific literature that evolution makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Before Darwin we thought we were created in the image of God by a supernatural Creator who brought about our existence for a purpose, but now that Darwin has done his work, and the other scientists following in his path, we understand that our true creator is the blind, purposeless material process of evolution. And if that is the case, then it is hard to say that the Christian faith properly defines ultimate reality; it is, rather, as the university tends to assume, something which improperly tried to define ultimate reality before we knew better.

When the subject of evolution comes up, traditionally the emphasis has been on what one might call a “Science-vs-Bible” battle. The understanding of the controversy has been that, read literally, or perhaps one should say “common-sensically”, the Bible seems to make certain affirmations: creation in six 24-hour periods, a world-wide flood, a time scale involving genealogies that suggest an age in the thousands of years for the earth. But science has established, or claims to have established, that all of these historical details are false, that in fact the earth is billions of years old, there was no world-wide flood, and creation took part gradually over a very long process and by a means which can be understood and described by scientists.

A Variety of Responses to the Conflict

With this conflict in place, the question then became: What should we do? Should we fight the science, should we reinterpret the Bible, or do some combination of the two? Or should we just give the whole thing up as a bad show—which is what a lot of people have done? And so you get into an argument.

The accommodationists or reinterpreters would quote St. Augustine, for example, saying, “Well, you’re not doing the Christian faith any favor if you are reading the Bible to endorse certain propositions which the educated pagan or secularist knows to be false.”(That’s a colloquial rendering of a famous quote by Augustine.) Rather you should take into account and on-board the best of the scientific knowledge of your time.

The alternative biblical movement of creation science would say: No, there are things too important to jettison that are at stake, such as the reality of the Scriptures as an authority that you can trust. How can you trust them if they’re wrong about such important things? Or take the reality of Adam as an actual individual who committed a sin, the “first Adam,” as the book of Romans puts it, who is compared to the “second Adam,” Jesus—they either have to be both real people or both mythical. And consider the reality of suffering and evil as caused by the fall; the whole system doesn’t work if you have a long process of cruel, remorseless, pitiless evolution beforehand.

So you get the different schools of thought about what you should preserve and what you should change, and how; about whether and to what degree you should reinterpret the Bible; about what in science you might take exception to. And so we have these familiar conflicts which divide the Christian world.

Even the conservative Protestant world is divided between “young-earthers” and “old-earthers,” as colloquially called. This is a conflict that to most people seems largely confined to conservative Protestants. The Roman Catholics aren’t interested in it because Genesis is not what they regard as most important; it’s the teaching authority of the church they are concerned about, and they are used to handling these problems with philosophy. It’s a similar case with Eastern Orthodox.God-believing Jews see it as a Christian thing that they don’t have a stake in. And of course many mainstream Protestants, as they are called—Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and so on—are embarrassed by the whole thing and wish the controversy would just go away.

And so one has a deadlocked controversy over all of these issues, one which dissolves into a lot of difficult questions of fact and evidence and so on. We are dealing with physics and radiometric dating and geology, and it becomes very fantastically detailed and difficult for many people to follow.

The Fundamental Issue

When I took a look at evolution, I decided to approach the whole controversy in an entirely different way. I did not go to the historical details and make those the issue, but rather I put those issues aside and went to something more fundamental, which was the way the scientific and academic world understands science and rationality, the way in which it defines the category of knowledge and how you can obtain knowledge, and what can and cannot qualify as knowledge.

This was a fundamental issue, touching everything that the university does, and underlying and supporting all academic or intellectual work in a variety of disciplines. It seemed to me it was the basic concept that had to be understood in order to see what was going on here, what was wrong with it, and what could be done about it.

So I put every other issue aside and said: Let’s just concentrate on one simple issue, the most basic problem, a problem that is so fundamental to the entire scientific and rationalistic understanding of the world that the whole tower will collapse if this one underpinning is removed from it. It’s so important that it’s best not to talk about anything else until we get this issue settled, because everything else depends on this.

So, what is this great issue? As I studied the theory of evolution and its pop iterations, its treatments in the scientific literature and so on, it became clear to me that what the theory was denying was not simply the Genesis chronology. It does deny that, of course, but that is relatively superficial.It isn’t merely saying that God took a long time to create, or that things happened gradually rather than suddenly, or that one thing grew out of something else rather than appearing out of nothing. It is saying all of those things; but it’s saying something far more fundamental and basic. It’s saying that God had nothing to do with the process from beginning to end. It is saying that the entire process of evolution involved only unthinking, purposeless material forces. From the first appearance of life to times of today there has been no supernatural interference, nor any need for supernatural interference, with the natural processes that actually could produce and did produce life and that caused life to grow to its present complexity and diversity.

No Such Thing as “God-Guided Evolution”

There is a cosmic creation story, of course, but I’m going to start midway through that with the story of the beginning of life. In the beginning were the particles in motion. There were the chemicals in a chemical soup, which had themselves evolved, but as I say, we’re going to start at this point. In that chemical soup the particles somehow came together by some process of chance or chemical laws to form a simple living organism.What made it “living” was that it was able to reproduce and to metabolize nutrients—a fancy way of saying “eat.” As the organism reproduced itself through copying its genetic material, copying errors and variations were introduced. Some of those variations were better at eating and reproducing than others; those were the ones that tended to survive and to pass their own characteristics on to their descendants. This lead to more variation—more differential survival, as natural selection is called—and gradually we got all the diverse kinds of plants and animals that exist, and eventually even human beings.

The process operates solely on these natural material factors and involves no goal, involves no supervising intelligence of any kind. And all of the evolutionary authorities are agreed on this; there is no difference of opinion; this is a consensus throughout the field.

There is no such thing, I want to emphasize, as “God-guided evolution.” Many people have stumbled into this error. They seem to rediscover it, you know, and they’ll say it as if it’s a new discovery: “Why hasn’t anybody thought of this? Evolution is just God’s way of creating us! There. You see?We’ve reconciled science and religion.” But if God actually guided and directed evolution, it isn’t evolution at all as the scientific community understands that term. It’s slow creation. Evolution is inherently unguided and purposeless. It produced human beings by an accident which could not be counted upon to produce anything like that again if the process were run through on another planet. We are the accidental products of a purposeless system which is our true creator.

“Religious Belief” — Man Created God

Now, if you have such an understanding of the evolutionary process, how does God fit into it?Well, it’s very simple. God doesn’t fit into it. But something called “religious belief” does.And this, like the idea that there could be such a thing as “God-guided evolution,” is an excellent opportunity to get confused, you see, because when we say that the authorities of evolution leave God out of their system or imply that God is either non-existent or completely and permanently out to lunch, they will often say, “Oh, no; some scientists are very religious,” or say, “We aren’t against religious belief.”

To avoid confusion, one must understand what the term “religious belief” means. It isn’t the case that God created human beings. It isn’t the case that God created life.God did not create man; rather, man created God. That is what “religious belief” means in this context. Having evolved by this mindless process from animals, primitive human beings, knowing no science, did not understand the evolutionary process that is their true creator, and so they invented a father-figure in the sky called “God.” And they had a need to do this sort of a thing, because they evolved a need to have some spiritual meaning or purpose to the universe, and so they invented one even though one does not exist. This process is called “religious belief,” and it’s real. God isn’t real, you see, but religious belief is real.

The way this works out in an educational system is as follows: at most major universities you might have a Department of Religious Studies.It’s a subdivision of anthropology or perhaps psychology. You study there, from a neutral, relativistic point of view, the various belief systems of Eskimo Indians, African tribes, whatever groups you have. And of course Christianity fits into that as one of the things to be studied on that basis. It is not anything that properly defines ultimate reality. Rather, ultimate reality in the university defines Christianity as one of those systems that human beings have invented because they lacked scientific knowledge, and which some people simply refuse to give up because of their emotional need to keep it.

Belief in Spite of the Evidence

So this is the naturalistic or Darwinian creation myth. It is one of the most important—probably the most important—pieces of knowledge in the modern mindset, because, you see, every culture has to have a creation story, a story that tells the people where they came from and how they get information to deal with their problems. You see, in every culture you go to the priests, and the priests will tell you how to solve your problems, because they are the wise people who know how you got here and how you fit into ultimate reality. Our priests are a scientific priesthood. It is to them we go for the explanation of how we got here and how we fit into ultimate reality. They are where we get the true picture that defines ultimate reality.And they, of course, are also who we trust to solve our problems.

The naturalistic creation myth is the story of a mindless, unguided, purposeless system.Why do the scientists and other intellectuals in the university and in the media, in the culture at large, believe this story? Do they believe the story because it has been investigated and validated by objective scientific evidence, because it has been established by repeatable experiments, by the very reliable means of science that we rely upon to do difficult things like to make airplanes and spaceships and medicines? If so, then rational people ought to believe it. If something as reliable as that has been used to validate the elements of this story, then you could see why all rational people are supposed to accept it.

But here’s the key point.Here’s where the really exciting stuff starts, where the revolution begins. No! The intellectuals do not believe in this story because it has been validated by scientific investigation. They believe in it in spite of the scientific evidence! They believe in it because science has been so defined in our culture that this story is inevitably true as a matter of logical inference quite regardless of the evidence. And again, this is something that should not be controversial. It’s stated in all of the scientific literature; where it isn’t stated explicitly it is stated implicitly—that is to say, it’s taken for granted.

What is the Question?

The way I often try to explain it to make it simple is: If the theory of evolution, Neo-Darwinism, is the answer, what is the question? The question to which it’s an answer is this: How could you possibly get the creating done without God? Now, the reason why the question is framed that way is because this is the way the dominant forces in the culture understand science, understand the whole process of scientific investigation, and indeed understand rationality. They understand rationality to be based in a naturalistic understanding of reality. Instead of believing that the Christian faith properly defines ultimate reality, our culture believes that naturalistic philosophy properly defines ultimate reality—in the beginning were the particles in mindless motion and the impersonal laws of physics and chemistry, and that’s all there was. At least, we assume that for purposes of scientific investigation and for other purposes in the university.

The Obvious Answer:

Only Unguided Processes

So the question then becomes: How did this happen, given that we know that natural processes actually did do the creating?Once you frame the question that way the answer is obvious. In the first place, it has to be an unguided process. Why? Well, what’s to guide it? You see, you can’t have an intelligent mind, a purpose, at the beginning that is unevolved, because that’s not something which is natural; that’s something which is supernatural. And you can’t have human beings and redwood trees just popping out of the void, because that’s a miracle. You see, that’s supernatural too. So what you must have is a process that takes the simplest thing you can imagine at the beginning and then works from there.

Now, many people say, “Well, where did that simple thing come from? Where did the particles in mindless motion come from?” But actually you don’t need an answer to that if you are going to operate a naturalistic system, because you can simply say:”Well, everybody has to start with something. If you say you’d like us to start with God, then fine, we’ll just ask you, ‘Where did God come from? Who created God, or how did God evolve?’ So you’re going to start with something, we’re going to start with something. But our advantage is we’re starting with something very simple. And if we can explain the entire cosmos on the basis of that simple starting point, then you can believe in whatever you want to believe as to what came before.

“But from the earliest moment of the cosmos—the Big Bang, if you like—there has been an unbroken process of law and chance, with nothing supernatural involved in it. And so, given that record, you can pretty much say that whatever happened before the Big Bang isn’t worth worrying about.It’s speculative. We can never have any knowledge of it; therefore, why say more about it? But what we do know is that for the past several billion years or more there has been nothing but this unbroken, orderly process of law and chance which ends up producing ourselves. And that is all that there must be or can be, if we are to have an understanding of reality.”

Only Natural Forces

Let us see how this method of reasoning works out. Take for granted a chemical soup which evolves by a chemical process from the simple particles. Can chemicals in a chemical soup come together spontaneously to produce a living organism? Well, that is not a question which is ever asked in the university; it is never asked in science, because the answer to it is: “Of course!” What is the proof? Living organisms exist. How could they exist if they could not come into existence?

To say that God created them, that a preexisting intelligence mixed the chemicals together to produce living organisms, is cheating. That is bringing the supernatural into the natural process, and in scientific—which is to say, rational—investigation, we assume that natural causes can do everything, because that’s all that we study. That’s all that we can study. To say that a supernatural force was involved would be to say we could never understand it, and that is to bring irrationality in.That is saying we should give up trying to understand; we should just shrug our shoulders and say “God did it” and then we don’t have to investigate everything.

So if we’re going to be rational, if we’re going to investigate, we have to assume that only natural forces were involved, and the question is just what detailed process did all of this. So of course chemicals can combine spontaneously to form a living organism, a very simple living organism. Can that simple living organism grow to be an immensely complicated biological cell?Of course, and for the same reason.Can a single-celled animal or plant or a bacterium change, by random variation and natural selection, so that it eventually becomes a complex plant or animal, flower or tree, caterpillar or human being? Again, of course! Human beings exist. How could they exist if they could not come into existence by a natural process? So the key steps are all established by the reasoning process. The reasoning process demands a theory of evolution of basically the Darwinian kind, which is to say one that relies on chance and law-like processes and nothing else.It’s simply inevitable.

The Rise of Naturalism in Our Culture

Now, with that understanding of how we are created, we can come to a tremendous amount of understanding in areas outside of science itself, because in the university world other fields of study are supposed to be as much like science as possible. The model is scientific enterprise. All science professors are doing research and making new discoveries. The professors of history and of literature and of law are supposed to be doing something like that, in their own way—studying and investigating things according to a common method which assumes that everything can be accounted for in strictly natural processes. This same process of reasoning governs, for example, the thinking in the law school community. And as this way of thinking becomes dominant in the culture as a whole, it comes to dominate political thinking, legal thinking, and so on.

I would say that the moment at which the naturalistic or Darwinian understanding of reality became dominant in our culture at large is pretty easy to spot. It was not long after World War II, around 1960. The World Wars gave a tremendous spurt to the scientific enterprise, because technology was so important in winning the war.With the start of the Cold War, the national government became heavily involved in making sure that everyone got a proper scientific education. They really went big into the public education business at that time, with textbooks and everything, to ensure that everyone got an education in the scientific way of thinking.

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year of Darwin’s centennial, one hundred years after the publication of Darwin’s masterpiece, The Origin of Species. Triumphal celebrations were held, particularly at the University of Chicago, to proclaim this had now become the dominant way of thinking in all fields.

It is no coincidence that at almost exactly the same time the Supreme Court of the United States decided in 1962 that it was unconstitutional to have any kind of official prayer in the public schools. The prayer in question was an ecumenical one, not a specifically Christian prayer, that said, “We give thanks to Almighty God . . .” you know, for the benefits that make these schools possible. It had actually been passed in the state of New York to bring Christians and Jews together, with their common God uniting them. But by 1960 it had become taken for granted in intellectual circles that prayer was divisive, because everybody has their own God, you see, and God is the product of human imaginary thinking, and it divides us because we have different imaginations. There’s not a common creator. And so the idea that you should begin the school day with a prayer to God was held unconstitutional, whereas it had been taken for granted over most of the country during that time.

By the way, I’m not delivering an editorial here over whether officially led school prayer is a good thing or not. That’s a complex issue. But the realization of this new naturalistic way of thinking was vital to the legal understanding of what could be done in the public schools. Since that time the public schools have secularized rapidly, as everyone knows, until they are now widely regarded as “God-unfriendly.”That is part of the reason why so many parents are home-schooling. It’s something that was unknown at the time that I went to public schools.

The Effect on Marriage

Look at what also happened at just about the same time: the nature of marriage changed drastically. As of 1960, marriage was widely assumed to be a divinely-ordained institution which was between a man and a woman for life, and while divorce might be permitted, it would be only under special grounds and with the state’s permission. It was difficult to get a divorce, and it was socially very disapproved of. As I grew up in a city in the Midwest, I didn’t know a single kid whose parents were divorced.Now, as you know, young people in school speak of children who have married parents as being the unusual ones.Tremendous change has occurred in the nature of marriage. In the early sixties, beginning in California, divorce by consent came in, and that meant consent of one party.

It’s a perfectly logical development. It was no longer possible to think of marriage as a divinely-instituted sacred rite any more than it was possible to think of human beings as specially created in the image of the Creator. Both would be impermissible, irrational ways of thinking. While you could believe in them yourselves, particularly on Sunday and in private, they could not be used as a basis of any social policy, because it would be unjust to impose somebody’s religious imagination on other people. And so marriage became a contract, a simple contract, like a lease of a room in your house.

Now, nobody understood, at the time that these so-called divorce “reforms” were instituted, that they were paving the way for homosexual marriage. If anyone had said that, they would have been dismissed as an alarmist. But in point of fact we see right now that that was exactly what was done, and again logically. You can rent a room in your house to a person of the same sex as yourself; you don’t have to pick somebody of the opposite sex. Why should this one contract be different? Once the logic is in place, it goes forward on its own momentum.

So this naturalistic understanding of reality comes into science, first, as a way in which it is possible for science to explain everything about how we were created.Then, because science is the model of rationality for the other departments of the university and of intellectual life generally in the culture at large, it becomes the basis for thinking about a subject like marriage. That is why we have a society today which is so divided over Proposition 22, which suggests that marriage should be between a man and a woman. This is considered, in the university-educated areas of the community at any rate, to be a reactionary and oppressive measure, although no one would ever have imagined questioning such a concept a few decades ago.So this naturalistic way of thinking has an enormous spillover effect into the culture, and it changes everything.

No Basis for Ethics

I’ll mention one more aspect of this. At our great scientific university at Berkeley there was a disturbance a year or two ago because a student was admitted who had witnessed a murder and done nothing to prevent it.He wasn’t guilty of a crime, because he didn’t have a duty under the law to do anything about that, but many people thought this ought to be a disqualification of some kind. It led the chancellor at Berkeley, who was concerned about these matters, to say they needed to have some sort of a committee to decide how they could educate people about morals and values and ethics, because they had just noticed they didn’t do that. Now he’s actually got a committee; he’s got a lot of church people from the faculty on it. But I’m afraid that I’m extremely pessimistic about their ability to do anything about this.

It’s sort of like how at one time after the Watergate scandals we in the law schools got an urging that to prevent lawyers from engaging in dishonorable and dishonest acts we ought to have courses in legal ethics. So we began requiring legal ethics, and I taught such courses myself. But the irony of it is that what law professors teach is how you can rationalize and argue for anything that you want to do.We’re quite good at that, in our way.But it tends to leave ethics a bit open-ended, you see.

Indeed, what we see at the university level is exactly what you observe in public schools at a lower level of the educational business—they find it very difficult to teach firm moral and ethical standards, even when they want to do so. That’s a really important point— sometimes they want to do so, but just don’t know how. On what basis do you do it? Evolution has no values. Matter has no values. We’re the accidental products of a meaningless system. Exactly how do you justify telling people that something is right and something is wrong? Or, if you are doing it, how do you justify it on other than “I have force. I can say this because I’m carrying a club or something else, and that is what gives me the authority”? What is the intellectual basis, the philosophical basis, for a claim that some things are right and other things are wrong? It’s very difficult to determine, and that is why we have programs with names like “Values Clarification.” The best we can do is help you to clarify your individual values. That’s what we do in legal ethics too—clarify your values and learn how to stay out of trouble while you’re doing whatever it is that you want to do.

This reflects a larger pattern: that reason is simply instrumental, it gives us no ends, because there’s no basis for ends.All it does is tell us how to get more of whatever it is that you happen to want—if it’s nuclear bombs or cash or medicines or whatever—and hence you have a society with the kind of values that you would expect. So this is what is coming out of the naturalistic understanding of reality.

Examining the Darwinian Theory

Well, now back to the starting point, after having spun out the implications of the story: how to deal with this question of evolution.The message that the biological theorists are giving us is clearly important for matters that are far removed from their narrow scientific discipline. These are propositions that have immense consequences for the society as a whole, so it is very important to know whether these propositions are true.Is it true that nonliving chemicals can spontaneously combine to form a living organism? Is it true that a combination of random mutations and natural selection can take a relatively simple organism like a bacterium and, given the right conditions and enough time, turn it into a butterfly, a bee or a human being? Or is this mythology?

In my first book, Darwin on Trial, I went through the literature of evolution and concluded that it’s amazing, considering how much is claimed for the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection, how little it has ever actually been seen to do. It is also amazing to discover that in 1859, when Darwin proposed the theory, his great opponents were not clergymen, not bishops of the Church of England—they rolled over almost immediately. It was fossil experts who said: “This picture does not at all represent what the fossil record is telling us. It is telling us that while new things do appear in rocks dated in different ages, they appear all at once without a prior history of step-by-step evolution, and they stay fundamentally the same thereafter until they become extinct or until today.”

Intolerable Questions

As I went through all of that negative evidence, it seemed to me that this was what, in the jargon of academic life, we call something that is “under-determined by the evidence;” that is to say, it is doubtful. So I asked myself: “Shouldn’t this be examined fairly to see whether it’s true, given how important this theory is?” Now, the answer I got, of course, is that that is an improper question. The great Darwinian authority, Richard Dawkins, was once asked by a television interviewer whether any Darwinian mechanism of mutation or natural selection had ever been seen to create new genetic information, had ever actually been observed doing what it had to do.Dawkins replied, contemptuously, “That’s a question only a creationist would ask” —that is to say, an irrational person. A rational person accepts this on faith. He didn’t actually use those last words, but that was the implication of what he said.

I also had the sense that none of the criticism of the negative evidence really made any difference.No matter what the point was, the answer would always be the same: “This is the best naturalistic understanding of how we came into existence that we have.What is your alternative? Your only alternative must be that naturalism itself is not true, that we are supernaturally created. By the rules of our society, that is a religious position which may not be considered in science, because science is devoted to the proposition that everything must be done by the kind of things that science can investigate, which is to say, material processes. So while you can improve our understanding of how nature did its own creating, you cannot challenge the basic assumption that nature actually did do its own creating with no assistance from God. If you think God had something to do with it, this is by definition a faith commitment inaccessible to reason, and it belongs in church on Sunday morning, or perhaps we can study it along with other creation myths and irrational delusions in the course in anthropology, as that is where it belongs.”

So I said, “Well, if you follow that philosophical path then of course you do end up with that conclusion. I agree, your theory is the best naturalistic model that’s ever likely to be produced.The only thing wrong with it is that it isn’t true! It doesn’t fit the evidence. If we don’t follow your naturalistic rules of reasoning, we would then conclude that science actually doesn’t know how life could come into existence from nonliving chemicals, or how simple forms of life could become so much more complex and diverse. Your mechanism doesn’t do it. Do you then have the authority as biologists to tell us what philosophical commitments we must make? To which again I got the same response: “That’s a question only a creationist would ask. The fact that you’re willing to ask that question disqualifies you from participation in serious intellectual discussion.”

A New Approach

I understood at this point that we needed to have a way of approaching this question which gets away from the sterile arguments and divisions of the past. We’re no longer going to talk about the details of this verse and that verse in Genesis, or the timing, or whatever. Perhaps we can have that discussion some time down the road.But we’re not ready to answer these questions yet, because in order to answer any questions about the Bible versus science, we have to first be sure that we know what science is. If science is naturalistic philosophy, as appears to be the case, then of course it contradicts the Bible in every single verse, from beginning to end! Then the whole biblical Christian system would be invalid, and it would certainly be completely wrong to claim that the Christian faith properly defines ultimate reality.

On the other hand, we don’t know exactly what science would be like if science were determined independent of the naturalistic philosophy that is now governing it. We do know, for starters, that scientists would not be claiming that natural selection has fantastic creative power, because the only reason they believe that is because of the philosophy, not because it is confirmed by any unbiased investigation of the evidence.

So we now have an issue which we can take into the mainstream academic world, where a question of the Bible or religion would never be allowed. The question we’re pursuing is: How much of what you claim is knowledge comes from impartial scientific investigation, and how much from naturalistic philosophy, which is to say, prejudice? We have to separate those two, because surely we do not agree that biologists or any other group have authority to order us to accept some philosophical assumptions rather than others, or have the authority to say God must be defined out of reality. This is going way beyond their expertise. To bring this issue into the universities, I have founded an intellectual movement called the Intelligent Design Movement.

Evidence for Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design is a theoretical approach in understanding which explains why the evidence for the creative power of natural selection is so bad—I always say it’s somewhere between extremely weak and totally nonexistent. Why is the evidence lacking? It’s not because people haven’t searched hard and long enough on our tax money for the evidence! It’s because natural selection in fact has no creative power, nor does any other known naturalistic mechanism have the power to do what a system of biological creation must do. We now understand that even the simplest living organisms, such as a bacterium, a single-celled creature, is a miniature chemical factory of marvelous complexity, packed with intricate processes that outdo anything you would find in a spaceship or a human-manufactured computer.

You have thousands or millions of proteins moving around, going to different places, doing different jobs. They have to be tagged. The tag has to be read. They have to receive instructions what to do. They have to read those instructions and carry them out. The whole system requires, in the language of computer talk, an enormous amount of information—an instruction book much longer than the Bible or all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica combined, or a computer operating system like Windows 2000 or the Macintosh system. It’s a vastly complex, meaningful text of instructions.

We know from our universal experience that such texts are not written by unintelligent processes.Chance assortments of letters . . . .Actually chance doesn’t make letters either, but never mind that! Assuming letters already in existence, chance arrangements of letters produce meaningless nonsense. Law-like combinations of letters produce simple repetitive patterns. That’s what a law does—the same thing over and over again.A book that was written by a law-like process would be like a macro on your word processor that said: “Copy the word “repetition” over and over again until the printer runs out of paper.” And that’s what you would get. A macro will do that. That’s a law-like process. It’s a very boring book, and it doesn’t ever get more interesting, because you see the very law that gives you as much meaning as it has in that word prevents any other meaning from emerging.

This is a very quick run-through of the basics of Intelligent Design Theory or Information Theory, and the reasons why you do not expect law or chance or law-chance combinations to write meaningful text instructions, the kind that must be present in something like a living organism to make it operate. When you don’t expect that sort of thing to be there, then you also understand why the evidence that says it is there is extremely weak to nonexistent.

Overcoming Delusion

We are at the beginning of an extremely exiting phase in human intellectual life. I greatly envy the young people who are going through their education now and are going to come of age in this period when there are so many exciting things to do. Our culture has been living under a delusion. It has been living under the delusion that a naturalistic creation mechanism has been proved by reliable scientific evidence to the degree where it should be accepted by all rational people. Because it believes this, it maintains that God is not part of objective reality which is accessible to everyone, that evidence of God’s actions is not present in living organisms, and that God is a subjective thing that exists only in your imagination. It isn’t “God created man,” but rather “man created God.” Lacking scientific knowledge, we imagined God as the Creator.That’s why it isn’t important to teach people about God in the educational system at any level. If they do learn about it, it’s on their own in Sunday school.If they don’t learn about it, they haven’t missed out on anything important. The educational system says that every day in every level.

Consider the famous question that Jesus posed to his disciples: “Who do the people say that I am?” Now, Christians will say that’s a tremendously important question.You’d better focus on that question and get the right answer to it, because if Jesus is who he said he was, then failing to recognize that is a very serious mistake. On the other hand, if he wasn’t who he said he was, but was just acting as if he was, then building your life on that is another kind of mistake. This is an important decision to make.

Yet does our culture consider it an important decision, an important question? No, of course not. They regard it as that you are missing out on nothing important if you never even hear of the name of Jesus. That is because they have answered the question, or assumed an answer to it, and they are very content to think about that answer as little as possible.The assumption is, of course:”Well, here’s who you were, Jesus.You were a guy who lived long ago.You were a teacher of some merit in terms of the standards of the day, but of course you didn’t know anywhere near as much as we do today. You didn’t know about evolution, for example. When you died you were truly dead, and if anybody says to the contrary, then that’s a myth that they made up for whatever reasons.

“We don’t have to investigate this, you see, because we can take it for granted, because if you were who you said you were, it would overthrow just about everything else that we know, or put it in such a totally different perspective that it would have tremendously disturbing consequences. Then people whose power and authority has been gained from a naturalistic understanding of reality would lose all of that power, would lose all of that authority. The priesthood that governs our culture would be overthrown.”

That’s why it’s such a provocative thing to say the things that are said in the prospectus of this lecture series—that the Christian faith, the reality of the Creator, actually defines ultimate reality. It happens to be true! But our culture operates under rules of knowledge, which means that such an idea cannot possibly be taken seriously.

An Exciting Challenge

It is a wonderful and exciting challenge for Christians of our time, or simply for honest thinkers of our time, to differentiate between the legitimate findings of scientific investigation on the one hand, and the naturalistic prejudices that make it almost illegal to look at the evidence objectively, and to go where the evidence is directing us rather than to where the priesthood of our culture wants us to go.

It’s an intellectual battle that’s already being fought. It’s already well along, and it’s just a matter of time before enough people come to understand that what is at stake is not a few verses from Genesis, not a few things that perhaps could be changed or reinterpreted without unsettling the basic understanding, but a contradiction of all of the fundamentals.Rather than, “In the beginning was the Word,” naturalism says, “In the beginning were the particles in mindless motion.” That’s bad news. Even if it were true news, it would be too bad, but we would have to accept it. But we know that it’s not true news, that it can be challenged effectively, and that’s what we’re in the process of doing right now.

 

 

QUESTION & ANSWER PERIOD:

 

Question: Can you offer some practical suggestions for college students in regards to “tuning up their baloney detectors” for the things they are being taught?

Dr. Johnson: One great problem among university students and others in this culture is they don’t know how to think logically, because they really haven’t been taught to. This difficulty in part grows out of the fact that certain subjects are off the table—you’re not supposed to think about them. Our educational system indeed encourages you not to think critically about these subjects. This non-thinking can apply to all sorts of areas.

Let me give you an example from evolution. Nobody in evolutionary biology is taught to think logically about the fossil evidence; the reason is because if you learn to think properly you may come to the “wrong” conclusion. So here’s a little thinking lesson. Scientific thinking in its true sense means you test a proposition against the evidence.What you don’t do is go to the evidence just looking for something to confirm what you want to believe, and then as soon as you find it you quit. That’s pseudo-scientific thinking. That’s just mining the evidence for something that confirms what you want to believe. Instead, what you have to do is go to the evidence, consider all the evidence, and consider it without bias.

Let’s apply this to Darwinism. Darwin’s theory says that a process of tiny step-by-step minor micro mutations and small scale variations adds up to macro change into something entirely new, and that this has happened again and again and again throughout the history of life. If this were true, you would expect to see it confirmed in the fossil record. Now, you wouldn’t expect to find it completely illustrated, because the fossil record is incomplete, and there are going to be missing pieces, but you’d expect to see this general pattern.

Now, in so far as the fossil record is incomplete, it will be much more incomplete in some areas than others. For example, land animals are rarely fossilized, and the reason is obvious—when they die they’re out in the open, they decay or they’re eaten by scavengers, so you don’t get fossils. You get lots of fossils among marine invertebrates who live in the shallow seas.Why? They get covered over with sediment when they die, so they get fossilized.That being the case, where would you expect to find a pretty clear pattern of Darwinian macro evolution—among the marine invertebrates or among the land vertebrates? The former, of course, particularly if your excuse for not finding more evidence of it is that the fossil record is incomplete.

In light of that, isn’t it interesting that practically all of the evidence which is cited in behalf of the Darwinian theory comes from land vertebrates? Archaeopteryx, the bird reptile; Lucy, the hominids, the ape-man; the mammal-like reptiles—all are from areas where the fossil record is most incomplete. If you look at the marine invertebrates, it’s a different story. They don’t like to talk about that. That’s where what Gould called “the trade secret of paleontology” is to be found. It shows that there is evolution of a sort, which is to say, variation back and forth within a type, but absolutely no pattern of step-by-step change of one kind of thing into something fundamentally different.

Now, where the record is most complete it’s hardest to tell a fictional story, because when you see variation you also see everything that’s going on around it, and so you see the evidence that it’s not going anywhere. But if you have an incomplete record, then you can take a piece of evidence and spin an imaginative story, because there’s nothing around it. The area where this is most obviously the case is human evolution. If you find a variant ape bone, you can always say, “Oh, it’s on the way to becoming human.” And if you can convince the other paleoanthropologists to accept this as a human ancestor, you become rich and famous and get your picture on the cover of National Geographic and you get a PBS television show devoted to you and your funding is secured for life. So what are the incentives here?

Taking this into account, it is an interesting fact that, while there are an enormous number of putative human ancestors that have been found in the fossil record, there are practically no ancestors of the modern apes. Why do you suppose a lot more human ancestors are found than ape ancestors?They have a higher market value.The incentives are to interpret the doubtful fossil that way. Now, is it an insult to science to say this? No, absolutely not. It’s basic to science. If anybody tells you, “You’re insulting scientists; you’re a wicked person; you must not say things like that,” that’s complete nonsense!

The reason that scientists insist on repeatable experiments is that bias colors results.So basic scientific thinking is the willingness to submit to objective testing standards so that people aren’t biased.It’s like a banker who says, “I don’t like to have my bank audited. I want you to just take my word.” Who wants to put their money in that bank?

Now that’s just an example of critical thinking with respect to the fossil record. Nobody is taught that in evolutionary biology.They are taught to stop thinking once they’ve found something that seems to confirm the theory. So we should teach this kind of thinking to our children.

Question: You mentioned that it’s beneficial to find certain fossils when your bread and butter is dependent on those findings.I think it would be beneficial for people to understand what is driving the funding for many of these scientific enterprises.

Dr. Johnson: I cover this subject in chapter four of Darwin on Trial, where Niles Eldridge, the Curator of Marine Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History, is very frank in describing it. I’ve debated Niles about evolution, and when he wants to prove evolution, he talks about Lucy and hominids. He doesn’t want to talk about marine invertebrates because he knows that’s disaster.He explains very frankly that in order to get a Ph.D. in paleontology and in order to get funding you’re expected to come up with evidence for evolution. That’s why there’s such an enormous bias that goes into trying to find something that confirms what people want to believe. I like to point out that it’s nothing short of heroic that the fossil record has been able to remain so completely un-Darwinian in the face of all this pressure!

Paleontology is not the only field in which this sort of thing exists. But in most other scientific fields there’s a moment of truth where you have to actually pass the experimental test. If you’re building a spaceship to go to the moon, it’s got to go and get there. And you can’t fake it. So that test ultimately has to be met of actually demonstrating the truth or falsity through experimental testing, which is indeed very, very reliable.

I sometimes use this example: suppose that instead of having real moon shots, we had simulated moon shots in which the scientists who designed the rocket got together after the simulated shot and decided whether it worked or not, with them getting increased funding if it did work, and getting thrown out of science if it didn’t. What would they decide? Yeah, of course it would work!

Well, that’s the case in evolutionary biology. The goal is to establish and validate what the field takes for granted. That’s why there is such a reward for finding the kind of fossil that fits into the story. But the only reason you interpret that fossil as part of an evolutionary transition is that you believe in that transition in the first place. So then it proves your preexisting belief to you. That’s circular thinking; it isn’t really scientific thinking.

Question: In your books you mention that the introduction to John is very important, the fact that it says, “In the beginning was the Word.”Why is that so important?

Dr. Johnson: Richard Dawkins, the arch-materialist, atheist Darwinist will tell you, quite frankly, “Physics textbooks may be complicated, but no physics textbook is anywhere near as complicated as a single cell in the brain of the physicist who wrote it.” And there are innumerable such cells, trillions of them, in the body.Where did all this complicated information come from? It’s what writes all that text that is the really interesting question. That’s what really has to be explained.

Science, under the influence of naturalistic and materialist philosophy, has tended to think that what needs to be explained is the matter, and once we’ve explained that, we’ve explained everything. But that’s clearly inadequate. Look at this in terms of the origin of life. Origin-of-life chemists all take as a starting point that the question is where you get the chemicals. But that’s crazy, because you can buy the chemicals in a store, but if you mix them together, you still haven’t got life! Or, to put it even more spectacularly, take an organism that has just died a moment ago. The chemicals are all there, and they’re all basically arranged right. A resurrection ought to be child’s play! But it isn’t.

Or look at it in terms of cosmology. Cosmology is the story of matter. It’s the story of how you get matter and chemicals, the elements, the planets, and so on. Very interesting story. But the really interesting story is where you get information. Where does the information come in? You have these particles that are unorganized and diffuse and so on, and you end up with human beings with all their intelligence. You end up with these highly organized biological structures. There either has to have been an enormous amount of information present at the beginning, or added later during the process. Big Bang cosmology is not a story of where the information came from.It’s radically incomplete, however much partial truth there may be in it.

Question: Why do you think the clergy was so ready to accept a naturalistic philosophy in the 19th century?

Dr. Johnson: It is easy to document the clergy’s ready acceptance of Darwinism. In the United States, Darwin’s main proponent, Asa Gray, was a Congregationalist, a real Christian, who saw this as a way to explain God’s creation mechanism. There were only two major intellectual figures who opposed Darwin’s theory. One was Louis Agassiz, professor of natural history at Harvard, the most eminent scientist of his time. He knew that Darwinism was wrong, he rejected it entirely, and he lost all of his following and reputation because of it. It was an irresistible tide. Charles Hodge, the Dean of Theology at Princeton Seminary, accepted a whole lot of the evolutionary picture, but he rejected the Darwinian mechanism at the end as atheistic. Same thing happened to him. They practically turned his picture to the wall, because he became so unfashionable after that. So there was a tremendous group-think process.

You must remember that this all came in the mid to late 19th century, after a century of philosophy based on what we call “enlightenment rationalism” — the age of Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, those sorts of people. The idea got going and became accepted among intellectuals that, after all, there had been a couple of centuries of war among Christians over the issues of the Reformation, brutal wars with torture and all of that.Science was coming up, and there was a thought that we could have a more civilized world if we just put aside these doctrinal quarrels and have a religion of reason. We’ll still have God as the Creator, but we’ll figure out what God wants by unaided human reason. Darwinism fit into that, but then it said, well, you don’t even need God as the Creator.

By that time most of the intellectuals in Christianity felt, as many of them continue to do today, that the only way to save Christianity, in the light of the destruction of the medieval church and the growth of the scientific worldview, was to conform it to scientific thinking. So they thought that they were saving the faith by putting it in league with rather than against science. And at that time, what may make this excusable or understandable, is that Darwinism was not so clearly atheistic. There was reason to think it might take a theistic direction in the future. So that’s an explanation as to why it was so widely accepted. And ever since it’s been a mark of being a hillbilly or something if you reject Darwinism.

Question: What evidence do you see now that perhaps atheists will be willing to more closely examine their naturalistic philosophy?

Dr. Johnson: I have some vigorous debates with atheists, and I sort of have a soft spot for them. I rather think they’re part of the picture—wherever you have the affirmative answer you need to have the negative answer. I like to say about the atheists that at least you’ve got to admit they’ve got the right question in mind; they’re only giving the wrong answer to it.And that’s a lot better than the people who don’t even have the right question in mind.

The people who drive me crazy are the ones who say, “Oh, I’m a Christian; I’m even an Evangelical, but I see no difficulty with naturalistic philosophy.” They accept without thinking this whole idea that God is part of the irrational world of faith and subjectivity and has no relation to the objective world of scientific investigation. They’re so confused that they have no idea what the question is. So give me, any day, a clear-minded atheist who’s got the right question on the table.These are people who are thinking about God every day of the week. So, you know, I think they might come to a different understanding of the answer.They’ve got a good chance, because they’re within sight of it.

Question: Isn’t the fact of the matter that there’s no such thing as unbiased, unaided human reason? Just as the naturalistic philosophers have presuppositions, so do the Christians. The Christianpresupposition is that God’s word is the authoritative revelation of God himself.

Dr. Johnson: I believe that it’s possible to talk about presuppositions. For example, I can talk to a Darwinist, a scientific materialist, an atheist, who’s willing to listen, and say, “Look, an important component of support for your belief is your belief that a materialistic creation mechanism has been demonstrated. I can actually show you that this is false, that you’ve been misled. Moreover, there are powerful intellectual arguments to show there can’t be such a mechanism.”

While this doesn’t exactly prove that there is a God, certainly not the God of the Bible, it sure does knock over an important support system for the contrary belief.So I like to find the presuppositions that we can agree with and talk on. And if I find that the person won’t listen to me, I’ll say, “Your presupposition is atheism or naturalism, and you’re unwilling to look at the evidence because you’re afraid to have that examined. Now what does that say about you? It shows that you’re not the intellectually fearless type you thought you were, doesn’t it?”

One big mistake is to think that faith commitments are something that some people have and other people don’t. I detest any talk of faith versus reason, you see, because it just isn’t the case.That’s just inaccurate. In order to be an agnostic, you have to have faith in a lot of things other than God. One of those things you need to have faith in is a naturalistic creation mechanism.

So it’s not a question of whether you’re going to have faith, it’s which faith you’re going to have. So what I want to be cautious about is not giving up too soon on our ability to discuss those presuppositions. They’re not really all equally rational.

Question: How do Darwinists reconcile the consequences of their belief that there is no right or wrong and their need to have a right and wrong in society and how they live?

Dr. Johnson: That is another powerful question. I have to take a deep breath, because there’s a whole history of thought about this subject. I think I’ll start with the short and simple answer, which is true of Darwinists and it’s true of lots of other people too, which is when their logic tends to go to a conclusion that they don’t want to get to, they don’t go there.They just cut it off at some point.

Typically Darwinists will assume the existence of a reason-based ethical system. For example, many people, such as Ivy League professors, are believers in the philosophical system of John Rawls, of rationalistic liberalism and so on. It’s all unguided. I mean, at the end of the road it’s all contradictory. But you have to go pretty far before you get to the end of the road.It can seem pretty plausible for much of the journey. So that’s how people make do. They just don’t carry their beliefs out to their logical conclusion.

There is another approach I’ve seen. I’ve discussed some of this in my chapter on the mind in The Wedge of Truth. A typical belief among intellectuals is that while the true thinkers, the advanced thinkers, know there’s no basis for morality, this is a truth which is best kept within the inner circle. So from Plato’s time to the present you’ve had the doctrine of “the noble lie.” Because of this, you have two types of scientific materialists. Some of them are like Richard Dawkins—they’re very hostile to Christian faith and ridicule it. But many others will say, “Oh, we’re friendly to that. We really don’t want the common people to lose it. We just want them to keep it within bounds, keep it on Sunday morning, keep it for private life, and so on. Don’t let it get involved in something where it’s dangerous. But within those limits, we actually would rather that the common people believed in God as a source of morality, nonsense though we know it to be, because otherwise what are they going to do?They’ll lose all possible moral sanctions.” So you’ll find that belief too.

Question: If you take Darwinian evolution to its natural conclusion, aren’t people actually cutting off the very limb on which they’re sitting, to even define what it means to think?

Dr. Johnson: I developed that thesis further in The Wedge of Truth in the chapter on the mind. Here’s one way I put it: you can’t have a mind guiding evolution, because there can’t be a mind until it evolves mindlessly from non-mind. That’s the naturalistic doctrine. See, it has to evolve first. But in fact you can’t have a mind even after that, because the mind itself must be the product of purely physical material forces. Many of the Darwinists do go further and draw that conclusion that your thoughts are just the product of neurons firing.

I tell a little anecdote that illustrates this. Arthur Kornberg, Stanford professor, Nobel laureate, professor of chemistry, gave a public lecture at one time in which he said, “I’m astonished that there are scientifically educated people, including medical doctors, who do not understand that the mind as part of nature is chemistry and only chemistry.”So I wrote to him and said, “Dr. Kornberg, I can clear this up for you. There’s no mystery. The reason that these medical doctors do not know that the mind is chemistry and only chemistry is that they have a chemical in their brains which causes them to hold this erroneous belief. Whereas you have a different chemical in your brain which causes you to believe that the mind is chemistry and only chemistry.” Now this is the simplest reductio ad absurdum technique—talk about the baloney detector—you see. Of course what Kornberg means is that your mind is chemistry and only chemistry, but not Kornberg’s mind. Kornberg’s mind is in direct touch with ultimate reality. That’s the way they think!

Talk about sawing off the limb on which they’re sitting! What becomes of science itself then? That is why materialism only gives an illusion of being a philosophy of rationality. It ultimately destroys the basis for any rationality. The true basis for rationality is the metaphysical story— “In the beginning was the Word” —the metaphysical story that we are created in the image of the divine mind. That’s why we can reason as much as we can. And the fact that we don’t get any better at reasoning is the doctrine of the fall and the effects of sin of being in the wrong relationship with that mind. This is what explains the intellectual world. Materialism does not.

Question: How do you balance Scripture with the newer things we’re learning with cosmology and other sciences? What advice would you give us “hillbillies” in regards to kids or grandkids who ask, “Was there a real Adam and a real Eve?” or, “Where did sin come from?”

Dr. Johnson: I understand how reasonable a question that is, and how much people would like me to answer it. Yet at the same time I am reluctant to answer it. Obviously I’m aware that parents raising children have to answer questions. They can’t just say, “Professor Johnson punts on this one, so so will I.”On the other hand, I have a particular mission, and it’s important for me to stick to it. I want to teach proper thinking, “baloney detecting,” about naturalism. I am reluctant to give too many answers where I would have to speculate.

My opinion is that the proper scientific attitude on this is to stay open-minded. I have become acutely aware that one must distinguish at all times between the present state of scientific knowledge, which is ephemeral and may change, and the process of open-minded, unprejudiced experimental investigation, which is permanently valuable. If you get legitimate inquiry going in the right direction, it will always get closer to the truth.

When people ask me such a question, it’s inevitably about Genesis as compared with science. And I have to answer: we don’t have the science part of that down quite yet in terms of an open-minded evaluation of the scientific evidence.

Now I’ll go one step further than that. I think when we do get it, what we’re going to find out is that it’s very difficult for a truly impartial science to say anything for certain about things that supposedly happened eons ago. And so it is a possibility that we will end up in a situation where we will say, “It appears that there was and had to be a period of creation—this is when the information was poured in—which seems to have operated under different rules than any that are accessible to us today, and so we can’t say anything for certain about it.” You see?And in that case, it’s a question of how you interpret the Scriptures and what authority you give to them, because there wouldn’t be a contrary story, at least in terms of those basic long ago things.

On the other hand, we might know certain things for certain much more. Let’s suppose that the whole dating issue solidifies so that more and more people, open minded, conservative Christians and everybody else, become convinced that there is definite knowledge there. Then that would have to be taken into account.

All I can say is I think we can face all of this fearlessly, that the march of knowledge, once we get things on the right track, is going to be going in the opposite direction from where it has been going. I think that we will surely see that the Bible got the main things right, that “In the beginning was the Word” is good science as well as good theology, and that we can afford to wait to get definite answers to all of those other things.

Question: I’m a third year law student. When I discuss with my law professors this whole idea of how a supernatural world view would fit in in deciding policy, law and government, they adopt the view that secularism is the best neutral common denominator. As you pointed out, in Europe during the 17th and 18th century we had tremendous religious wars, and that was only between Protestantism and Catholicism, whereas in America today we have Buddhism, Hinduism and so on. Their viewpoint is that if we allow the supernatural into the picture, then whose supernatural is it? Whose God is it? And my question is, what’s a good entry point to engage that discussion with them that would refute the fact that secularism is the best common denominator to generate all these policies?

Dr. Johnson: That’s another very good question, and of course one I’m awfully familiar with, being a law professor myself. In some respects I resonate favorably to the concern.They’re a bit like the atheists in that they are giving the wrong answer, but they’ve got the right question.It is necessary for the culture to have a common rationality that is acceptable to the major divisions within it, but does not adopt one position unreservedly, because that can lead to immense civil conflict.

We’ve had a lot of successful experience with that in the United States. Europe in the 17th century was one thing; that’s long ago and far away. But look at the last two centuries of American history. In the 19th century America was an overwhelmingly Protestant country that welcomed into its citizenship millions upon millions of Catholics and Jews and successfully integrated them into this greater community, and we did not have civil wars. To look for acts of discrimination on religious basis you have to find a few awfully small scale things. There were private acts of discrimination, but publicly they were welcomed very quickly into full citizenship and of course did very, very successfully, and a lot of adjustments were made.

Then the ideology of the public schools became that “enlightenment rationalism” is the neutral position. This is what your professors think. Well, this is where your professors go wrong, because enlightenment rationalism is one of the aggressive ideological competitors which wants total victory.That’s why they don’t want to allow school choice or vouchers or whatever. They say everything must be taught from our ideological viewpoint.It’s not neutral at all. They also think that it’s sustained by science.It’s not sustained by science; that’s the subject of the rest of the talk. In order to maintain it they have to censor scientific thinking, as they do, by kicking out of science anybody who questions the naturalistic presupposition, by not allowing critical thinking in the schools.

So they now have become the established official church. That’s what I call this—the established religious philosophy of modernism.They’re the tyrant. They’re the oppressive priesthood. They’re the established church. And they must be forced to loosen up. There are lots of ways to do that. We start in a small way. We say in the first place you’ve got to allow scientific inquiry in science.That’s pretty hard to dispute, although they do dispute it, as they identify science with naturalism. Second thing is you can’t have a monopoly over the education system. Many times the modernists have made tracks like they would like to outlaw outright parochial schools. They certainly want to deny them any tax money. They say that’s “our” money. They think tax money belongs to them and not to the tax payers. But it’s not their money; it’s our money, and so there should be choice in education. The very epistemological relativism that they preach would lead to that.So they’re totally against their own principles in opposing that.

Now as this develops, we will get change. The public philosophy that unites us all will change. It will not cease to exist. It will go more towards being like it once was when it worked best. What’s happened in the second half of the 20th century is that the idea of a neutral public reasoning has been perverted to become a naturalistic public reasoning.

Now, I do want to say that that naturalistic public reasoning is not devoid of virtues. It’s not totally evil. It’s misguided in important ways and it should be only one of the competitors in the public circle rather than to dominate it. But you know when you talk about overthrowing it altogether or whatever, even I get a bit nervous, because when I look around at the people on my own side, I sometimes feel like the Duke of Wellington felt at Waterloo when he was asked to survey his English army and he said, “I don’t know if they scare the enemy, but by God, they scare me!”

The concept of a not neutral, but fair-minded boundary of public reasoning that keeps this whole thing together is, in my opinion, a perfectly legitimate concept in itself.But it has to be subject to change and criticism. And as it’s criticized, it will change, and this will open up lots of opportunities for the truth to speak for itself, and that’s good enough.