“In the Beginning Were the Particles”

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

Edited transcript from a lecture sponsored by Grace Valley Christian Center Sunday, March 5, 2000 (10 a.m.)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God-children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-14)

Solving the Genesis Problem

When I speak from the pulpit on the subject of creation and evolution, I always choose as the scripture the prologue to the gospel of John. Never do I choose what would be the obvious alternative choice, the opening chapter or chapters of Genesis. It’s important to make clear the reason for that. Both are magnificent scriptures; both could be used. But the opening chapters of Genesis tend to focus attention on the order in which creation appeared, the chronology, the particular elements of the creation of each kind of thing in succession. And that’s very good, very interesting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, the opening of the gospel of John fixes our attention on the meaning of creation and its importance in terms of the whole of Christian doctrine and the Christian worldview. So that is certainly the more important thing to understand, at least at the beginning.

Another reason for choosing this set of scriptures rather than anything in Genesis is that to choose Genesis can give people the impression that the story of evolution and creation and the debate over this subject has to do with those early chapters of Genesis, that it’s a problem in Genesis, and if you can solve that problem, the rest of the Bible is unaffected. And many people would like to believe that, because it then makes it rather easy to solve. You just say, “Well, we can reinterpret Genesis to accord with the facts that the scientists want us to believe, and then we’ll be OK, because, after all, Christian faith is not really particularly about the details of the order of creation, it’s about the great drama of sin and salvation and redemption, the cross, the resurrection and all. So if those things are unaffected, then we can live with a problem in the details of the beginning.”

But this would be a great misunderstanding to suppose that the problem can be confined to the opening chapters of Genesis. To make that dramatically clear, we look at the prologue to the gospel of John. I suppose if you were to pick out fourteen verses from anywhere in the Bible to stand as a summary of the whole thing-obviously inadequate, but a brief outline of the entire Bible and its meaning-these would be the fourteen verses you’d choose as representing that overall account. It starts with the most basic things and is a marvel of expository writing in that it makes everything so clear and puts it in place.

In the Beginning was the Word

“In the beginning was the Word.” In the beginning was wisdom, intelligence, logos, the creative speech of God, the purpose of God-all of this encapsulated in the beginning. “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” Now here is a difficult concept being introduced right away, because the Word both was with God and was God. At a superficial level these appear to be two very different things. So immediately we’re being introduced to the doctrine of the Trinity, the sense in which the Word, the second person of the Trinity, is both with the first person of the Trinity (the third will come up later) and was God. There is no separation between those two.

He was with God in the beginning, not created at some point after the beginning. This point was a matter of great difficulty to the early church, to understand and to fit whether the Word made flesh was perhaps one of the created things, the first and most important of the created things (this was the Arian heresy), or whether it was the Creator in the beginning, begotten, not made.

“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that was made.” So we see that all of creation proceeds from the Word, from this creative purpose and speech of God, from the Trinity itself. Everything that was made . . . and here I think it’s not wrong to add to that: whether it was made directly and all at once, or by some gradual process that is a result of some God-ordained process . . . everything was made by God.

“In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” Again, very important concepts being introduced here in quite brief, spare language. There aren’t very many things in all of the world’s writing where you find so much introduced in so few words so eloquently.

Think about light. Light is something which you can see in the darkness. So you see the light at the end of the tunnel, and that, of course, is encouraging. You can see the light. But more importantly than that, you don’t just see the light-you see everything else because of the light. The light illuminates everything else. And that’s a very important thing to know about truth and light. It is not just true in itself, but it leads you to new truth, it leads you to understand other things. That’s the kind of truth we want, not something, you might say, that’s just a static truth-it’s true, and there it is; it just sits there- but it’s a dynamic truth which opens up new truth, which opens up the path to life by knowing this truth. It’s something you can use. It’s something you can put your weight down on. It’s something that you can rely upon as a guide to other things that challenge you.

“The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.” You see how this again encapsulates what I’ve just explained: a light which gives light to every man, to every person, was come into the world. It’s a guide in itself, and it illuminates everything else.

“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” This is repeating an earlier verse: “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” So in addition to understanding the light, we need to understand the darkness. The darkness rejects the light; it does not understand the light; it does not comprehend the light which gives life to man.

“He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” Already we are deep into the concept of man’s rebellion, the concept of sin. The light may not be recognized for what it is, or it may even be recognized for what it is and rejected because of what it is. It seems odd that a person in darkness would prefer the darkness to the light, but the passage tells us that this is the case.

“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” Now that’s an important piece of news. If this is true, then it’s an important truth. It’s not a minor truth. It’s a truth which tells you how to become a child of God.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” This too was a matter of great difficulty to be explained in the early church. As many fine writers, such as the theologian Leslie Newbigin, have explained, this was a concept that created great difficulties for both Greek and Hebrew culture, the Greek in particular. The Word, the eternal essence of God, was something that was inherently remote, in another realm, and for it to become flesh and dwell among us was nonsense. Hebrew culture had another difficulty particularly, because the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us and dying the death of a criminal on the cross was a concept that initially made no sense at all. It is a concept that people still find very difficult to understand.

Taken For Granted

There’s an enormous amount of content in the prologue of the book of John, important content. You can see at once that if this is true then everybody ought to know about it, and if you don’t know about it, you’re missing out on something important. Now I’d expect 100 percent agreement, although I wouldn’t get it, from reasonable people, be they Christians, atheists or whatever, that if it’s true, it’s important. They differ, of course, over whether it’s true.

This always used to bother me as an adult convert to Christ and a senior professor at the University of California at Berkeley, as I would sit in the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley and hear a passage like this or a sermon based on the kind of thinking that comes from this. Here’s what would bother me. I’d think: The church is adjacent to the university campus, and it has always thought of itself as involved with the campus. A few years prior we had a chancellor on our governing board, the session. The pastor is chaplain to the football team. The straw hat band comes over to our parties. In this superficial sense there is an identification with the university.

But as a faculty member, I knew that pervasively throughout the academic realm it is taken for granted-in fact, no one would ever think it necessary to discuss the point-that all of this is false, that all of this is illusion, self-delusion. For example, my colleague John Searle in the Philosophy Department is one of the world’s most prominent philosophers, and deservedly so; he is a man of tremendous ability as a philosopher of mind and language. He is also an academic leader on the conservative side, which means to say that he believes that there is such a thing as truth, that there is such a thing as value in literature and morals, and so on. Yet John Searle is also a materialist; he believes that everything begins in matter. In his most recent book he said that philosophers like himself differ from the philosophers of half a century ago in that back then the philosophers thought it was necessary to explain why Christianity or theistic religion generally was all wrong. But this is no longer necessary, because they simply take it for granted. He says we understand that nature is all there is, that all events are natural events, that evolution explains how we were created, and that anything supernatural is an illusion. He said, “It’s just an uninteresting topic to us. Even if God existed, he would have to be part of nature.”

That’s what’s taken for granted over at the university. So I thought, well, somebody has really got it wrong. Either my leading colleagues have got it wrong or these church people have got it wrong and then I’ve got it wrong. How can we explain that the cultural leaders, the great intellects, the big brains and the learned are so convinced that another starting point, a starting point in matter, is the only proper way to think?

In the Beginning Were the Particles

I’ve written a little parody of the prologue of the gospel of John to indicate the dominant cultural belief of our time. It goes like this: “In the beginning were the particles. And the particles somehow became complex living stuff. And the stuff imagined God, but then discovered evolution.” Here again you have in a few words a lot of profound learning.

“In the beginning were the particles.” John Searle will tell you this. He says that if you want to be taken seriously in the academic world today, then there are two things you just have to admit, that you have to agree to, to get a ticket of admission. You’re outside the conversation if you don’t. One of them is that the world consists entirely of particles, the things that physicists study. This is a philosophy that’s sometimes called materialism; the correct philosophical term is physicalism, because particles make up both matter and energy. That’s physicalism. Naturalism, another term, means nature is all there is; nature is made of particles, and everything else just comes from the particles.

“In the beginning were the particles.” No mind, just particles and impersonal laws of physics and chemistry. And by some combination of chance and these physical laws, the particles somehow became complex living stuff. This is skipping rapidly over a lot of cosmic history, of course, to get to the main point, that the particles become complex living stuff by a purely natural mechanism.

“And the stuff imagined God . . .” Now we get to a key point. See, it’s not “In the beginning was the Word,” not “in the beginning God created,” not “God created man,” but rather, “man created God.” The complex stuff imagined God, because, having evolved from the primeval ooze of chemicals and lacking scientific knowledge, primitive human beings imagined a father figure in the sky, the only good story they knew, and credited that with their creation.

“. . . But then discovered evolution.” When they discover that evolution is their true creator and that evolution is a mindless process, an unguided, purposeless process, that is called “the death of God.” That’s the philosophical jargon for the recognition that God was never more than an illusion. It’s like Santa Claus. It’s a grown-up version of Santa Claus. When a child has learned skepticism, and a neighborhood kid says, “You know, it’s your parents that put the presents in the stocking,” and then the child creeps out of bed and to the head of the stairs and sees mom and dad putting the presents in the stocking, that’s the death of Santa. Now the child could still say, “The ‘spirit of Santa Claus’ is invisibly and undetectably behind my parents.” That’s liberal Christianity. But anyone with any intelligence can realize that this is a dodge, putting off recognizing the truth.

Science or Illusion?

So there’s the situation I was in. I didn’t know quite how to evaluate this, because it seemed rather difficult to imagine that all those brilliant people could have it dead wrong. Moreover, they can say: Here’s how you can tell we don’t have it wrong. Look at the progress we’ve made. Look at the inventions-electricity, nuclear power, vaccines, space travel, the Internet. All of this comes from scientific thinking, and scientific thinking is thinking that begins with “In the beginning were the particles and the laws.”

These people say that in order for the world to be rational, and rationally comprehensible by human beings, it must operate according to invariant natural laws, or to chance processes that we can at least predict statistically as probabilities. That’s how we can make things work. By assuming that the world is controlled by invariant natural laws and not by a potentially capricious Creator, we can be sure of everything that is going to happen, and that enables us to do scientific research with confidence and to produce these inventions.

So if you are going to believe something else, then it’s rather inconsistent of you to fly in airplanes and have refrigerators in your house and go to a doctor. You should go to a witch doctor when you’re sick, or to a prayer service. If you rely on science, as everybody does, then you should rely on science to tell you how the world works, what it’s made of, and where it’s going. That is why your belief is an illusion. It may give you comfort; it may even make you a better person, conceivably, but it’s fundamentally an illusion, just as the belief in Santa may give the kids comfort and make them better kids-he knows whether you’ve been naughty or nice-but it is fundamentally a delusion.

Well, how is one to evaluate this? Notice how this argument that I’ve just summarized for you ties into the notion of the Word as light. Some people will want to say, “You can’t actually prove that God does not exist. You can’t prove something like that.” Well, it’s really true; it’s hard to prove a negative. So perhaps there is some wiggle room in here that you could get God back into the system as being behind it all in some undetectable way. But what kind of light is that? The scientific materialist, the John Searle philosopher, or whatever, will say, “What wisdom did anybody ever get from starting with that starting point? Didn’t it just lead you into error? We didn’t discover evolution, after all, until after we put that aside. And this is what enabled us to become as wise and powerful as we are.”

So you see, the light that shines and illuminates everything now is the light of “In the beginning were the particles.” That’s why we aren’t even interested anymore in hearing about anything else. You can say, “Well, you can’t prove that I’m wrong, but we can prove that you’re uninterested, and that’s good enough for us.” It sounds pretty powerful, but in fact it isn’t.

Where is the Evidence?

When I began to look into this subject, I surmised that if it was really true that in the beginning were the particles, then this was a tremendously important thing to know too. But for that to be the case, the particles would have to be able to do the creating on their own. The particles must be able to form complex living stuff. I asked: Is this really the case? Does scientific evidence tend to show that this is possible or impossible? Do you believe in it because of the evidence that you know as scientific specialists, or do you believe in it in spite of the evidence, because you are philosophically prejudiced?

What did I discover? That you’re not allowed to ask that! As Richard Dawkins put it, “That’s the kind of question only a Creationist would ask.” And indeed, one can see why you’re not allowed to ask that. Because in fact there is no scientific evidence which tends to support the view that a soup of chemicals can spontaneously combine to form a living organism. All the experimental evidence is against it.

In fact, if you ask about the creative power of natural selection, that supposedly took the simplest living organism and made it into complex plants and animals and human beings, saying, “What creative power does this mechanism of natural selection have?” they will answer, “Well it must have an awful lot, or it couldn’t have done all of these wonderful things, could it?” “What has it actually been seen to do?” “Well, you know, there’s dog breeding, and there is a population of peppered moths that had more dark moths one year and more light moths the other, there’s a little back and forth variation not involving any creation of anything new, any innovation whatsoever. We can show you that. That’s enough. That’s some change, and there’s lots of time available, so it could add up to lots of change.”

Well, to this I could say, “Wait a minute! We’re not just talking about change here. If you take a pile of dust and turn it into a super computer, you can call that change. But I call it creation. That is to say, it is adding design, it is adding complex parts, it’s adding software, it’s adding genetic information. Where does that all come from? Are you trying to tell me that the fact that there are variations in populations-sometimes more tall people, sometimes more short people, sometimes more fat people, sometimes more thin people-that this shows how you get people in the first place?” Well that is what they’re saying. All of that, plus time and the right conditions-that produces the creating.

And so it came to be clear to me that this was wishful thinking, that the evolutionary naturalists believed in their theory not because of the evidence that they’d observed, but in spite of the evidence. They believed in it because they’d defined science and scientific investigation to be the same thing as “In the beginning were the particles.”

A Rational, Predictable Cosmos

If the Darwinian theory of evolution is the answer, what is the question to which it is an answer? The question is: How did the particles do the creating? How do you get creating without God, without any preexisting intelligence, without the Word? The Darwinian process of investigation simply assumes that to be the case. So you are not allowed to ask: Is it possible for nonliving chemicals to form a living organism? That’s taken for granted. We know that for sure. How do we know it? Living organisms exist. How could they exist if they could not come into existence?

Well, maybe it took God to create them. “Ahh. That is religion. I thought we were talking about science. Religion belongs on Sunday morning, Saturday in some cases, but never during the week when we talk about what really happened.” Religion, in scientific naturalist jargon, means fantasy; it means Santa. So it is assumed that the creative process exists, and all we need to do is find out a little bit of change that confirms what we already know to be the case, and then we’re set, we’ve established the whole theory. So here we have not light; we have massive darkness. We have prejudice. We have a cultural delusion of enormous significance.

But now what about the rest of it? What about that light that illuminates everything else? What about those airplanes, and vaccines, and those other wonderful things that scientific technology produces? Are they produced because the scientific investigators assumed “In the beginning were the particles”? The answer to that is: Absolutely not. What scientific investigators do assume and properly assume, is that the world, or at least a great deal of it, operates according to rational principles and laws and not chaotic laws, and that’s why it’s possible to do experiments and have them come out the same all the time rather than differently on different days of the week depending on which capricious god is ruling that particular day. It’s a rational cosmos which operates in predictable ways.

Now why is that? Well the logical reason for that is that it is created by a rational Creator. Why are we able to understand a great deal of this cosmos? Why are we able to understand and predict its operations? Because our minds are created in the image of the Divine Mind which created the cosmos. What could be more direct and obvious? Why do we not understand it better than we do? Why do we sometimes go wrong? Well that’s explained by the problem of sin. We preferred the darkness to the light, we are out of the right relationship with the Creator, and that creates damage, for which we pay the price.

What if our minds were created by a mindless material process? What if our thoughts, as scientific materialists assume, are the product of neurons firing in your brain, purely chemical and physical processes? Would you produce, out of this, a mind capable of inventing differential calculus? Of composing the symphonies of Mozart? No, of course you would not! Irrational processes produce only irrationality. Rational creation produces the reasoning mind. We can clearly see that in fact the story “In the beginning was the Word” is the correct story of science and of rationality as well as of salvation and spiritual development.

Technological optimism and literary despair

What about all that success that our academic and scientific culture, has achieved? We find that along with great accomplishments, our academic and our intellectual culture is infected with a madness and with an irrational spirit. This was best expressed in an aphorism by a Chinese scholar, who said that modern culture is “a combination of technological optimism and literary despair.”

You see, this is because our mode of knowledge, our way of thinking, wants to ascribe everything to material causes and material causes alone- “In the beginning were the particles.” We’ve come to be very good at understanding the things that can be understood through material causation, that is, the way physical particles operate. The great triumphs are things like quantum mechanics, and generally physics and the technology that comes out of that. To put it very briefly, we’re really good at building gadgets. The Internet works, and it gets better all the time. But what comes out over it? Junk and filth. That’s where we’re not so good. And indeed, in the literary parts of the universe, the humanities, you find that we have lost the basis for any rationality at all. No one can tell whether or why Shakespeare is better than whatever people scribble on the walls. No one can explain why one process of moral thinking is better or worse than another.

The chancellor of the Berkeley campus has been sufficiently concerned about this, in light of some of the things that have happened, to ask the faculty to form some sort of an institute, beginning with committees, to develop a basis for explaining how we teach morals and ethics to students. Of course they won’t do that. They can’t do that, because they don’t have a basis for it. They don’t know where to start.

They have no starting point, because, you see, the particles don’t provide a basis for knowledge of right and wrong, for knowledge of the true, the good and the beautiful. They provide a basis only for a knowledge of how particles operate. And particles operate mindlessly and without any sense of morality or beauty. So it turns out that those accomplishments are not so great after all. They are partially great-great in the area of that technological optimism, but correspondingly dreadful in that area of the literary despair, which also so infects our public education at lower levels.

Triumphs and Blunders

Even when we get into the areas that we tend to call “science,” don’t think of that as an unmixed progress from triumph to triumph. Whatever you may think of evolutionary biology-which I regard as one of the gross failures and the university thinks of as one of its successes-there are other things which are less controversial. When I was a young man, the great scientific fields were Marxism, Freudianism, behaviorism. All of these fields which dealt with human behavior and society, social theories, anthropological theories and so on, these are all dead or dying fields. These are all very unsuccessful.

When I was a law student we were taught that Freud had discovered how the mind works, and that the law should move to understand this scientific knowledge. If you rejected it, you were showing what Freudians called “resistance” and you needed psychoanalysis to help you over this problem. Now all of this seems completely ridiculous. Freud has lost all of his scientific standing. But you see, to intellectuals, that was good science in the forties, fifties and sixties. So there are triumphs and also blunders, even in the areas that were accepted as scientific.

The reason for this is again apparent in this passage. Why did brilliant people go so wrong? While understanding some things so very well, as they have, and they deserve credit for it, why have they understood other things so poorly? Where does it go wrong? Well of course the answer is right here. We can explain it. They have failed to understand that in the beginning was the Word. And the Word is not a thing or a concept in the minds of men. It is not created by man. The Word is God and it was with God in the beginning, and all things were created through the Word. The Word is personal.

Reality of the Word

At the basis of reality is a personal reality-the Word. The Word is the foundation of truth, beauty and goodness in all levels. This is why the great literary figures could achieve what we all recognize instinctively, although it’s not scientific, as a real knowledge of God and his purposes. Look at Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare. This is why you can sense something of the same kind, nonverbally, in the great symphonists like Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, who no longer exist in our world of literary despair. This is why the artistic can be the reflection of the mind of God-because the mind is a reality.

I discovered, as I went through all of these issues, that I could feel confident that this story actually does describe reality as it really is. The illusion that scientific knowledge has replaced it with something else, something very different and something better, is just that-an illusion. It is a self-delusion. It is a delusion which is explained by this story: Although the light came into the world, the world did not know him. “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” And that is because “the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

So this passage in the gospel of John is right, scientifically as well as spiritually. Of course it would have to be; it couldn’t be right one way without being right the other. It explains the true foundation of knowledge, and I think it sets the agenda for what will be a very different intellectual program in the twenty-first century than we’ve seen in the twentieth. But how that will develop is another story for another time. For today, we’re just at the beginning, and “In the beginning was the Word.”