“Why Naturalism Rules the Academic Mind . . . and Why It Shouldn’t”

Phillip Johnson | Tuesday, March 07, 2000
Copyright © 2000, Phillip Johnson

Edited transcript from a lecture presented at Freeborn Hall, UC Davis sponsored by Grace Valley Christian Center Monday evening, March 6, 2000

The Kansas Controversy

There were some exciting events that happened out in the state of Kansas recently that made national and international news. It makes a good story to start out with the Kansas episode, although I am really leading up to some more exciting things that are happening in the university world than in the world of secondary education. But just to introduce the subject, let’s take a look at the Kansas controversy.

I first knew it was going to be a big story when, in the Sunday issue of the Washington Post in early August of 1999, I read a somewhat alarmist story about what the Kansas State Board of Education was supposedly about to do. According to this Washington Post story, which was reprinted in all the major newspapers in the country, and minor ones too, for that matter, the Kansas State Board of Education was about to pass a new science curriculum for kindergarten through twelfth grade that would wipe out virtually all mention of evolution and related concepts-natural selection, common ancestors, and the origin of the universe. The story said that it did not explicitly forbid teachers to teach evolution, but would remove it from the curriculum that was state-directed and would hence put teachers under great political pressure from parents and local people not to teach this subject.

That story set the tone for what other reporters said was going on in Kansas. If you read anything about it today, you will probably see a story that says that the Kansas board removed evolution from the curriculum altogether, perhaps that they substituted creation science, or that they invited teachers to start teaching the Bible, or, as one story from Scotland had it, the Kansas legislature made it a felony to teach evolution in the state.

Now, actually none of this really happened. And when we understand exactly what really did happen, it seems like an awfully small pop to set off such a worldwide explosion. The Kansas school board resisted certain draft standards that were proposed by a large committee of Kansas educators based on the national standards, and they cut them down somewhat. But, in fact, the standards that they approved have considerable mention of evolution, natural selection, random mutation, and so on.

But they did draw the line-perhaps the most dramatic thing they did in a rather straightforward way-when they said that they understood that all of these concepts had scientific validity in describing in what they called micro-evolution, which is variations that actually occur in nature, mostly back and forth variations, without making fundamental change or new innovations. The standard textbooks’ examples of this are a peppered moth population that at one time had more dark moths and at another time more light moths, depending on the color of the background trees, and finch beaks on an island in the Galapagos chain in the Pacific, whose beaks were of a larger average size following a drought year than they were during a year of plentiful rainfall. So these variations actually occurred, were measured by scientists, and were not controversial in Kansas or elsewhere.

But the Kansas board thought that it was going a whole long way to extrapolate from these examples of minor, in-species variation to an entire creation account from the beginning of life through the appearance of human beings, and they said that this grand macro-evolutionary story was more speculation than scientific fact. Therefore, while they did not object to teachers teaching it, they left that entirely in the hands of individual teachers and local school boards. In the statewide tests they would test the subject only at the level of micro-evolution, and would not require the students to know macro-evolution.

Well, if you just think about that for a moment, the consequence for how much is no longer being taught is awfully minor, because if the teacher is teaching mutation and selection and all of that to show about the finch beaks and the peppered moths and so on, then it takes just about one sentence to say, “and this accounts for all the evolution that occurs after there, so this is how you get plants and animals in the first place,’ or something of that account, and that adds up to the rest of it. The basics of the subject would be presented anyway. So it is only speculative as to what effect this would have on any given teacher, since they were perfectly free to teach the subject exactly the way the science educators nationally and in the state wanted them to.

Pinheads Fit For Extinction

You might wonder why this made such a tremendous impression on people worldwide and caused what I think can quite fairly be described as a media firestorm. There were table-pounding editorials in every major newspaper in the country, in Europe and Asia, and a number from London, all of them denouncing the Kansas board in the strongest possible terms as attempting to take us back to the dark ages, as attempting to destroy science, as putting the United States at tremendous disadvantage in comparison with other countries because our young people wouldn’t know science.

The editor of Scientific American called for a boycott of Kansas high school graduates, saying that the scientists on admissions committees of colleges should tell the parents of Kansas that the qualifications of their children “will be scrutinized very, very closely because we want to send the message that doing this sort of thing has consequences.’

Some really colorful things came out of the big-city press. Gene Weingarten, a columnist at the Washington Post, characterized the people of Kansas as “pinheads who would and should be eliminated by natural selection, because that is how it works.’ You know, it must a lot of fun when you are a reporter to be able to let loose like that. I mean, what other large group can you describe as “pinheads fit for extinction’ and not be met with boycotts, lawsuits and a whole lot of other trouble? But these folks were designated targets from whom you didn’t have to worry about any retaliation. They could not speak for themselves.

I was particularly taken by the comments of a scholar-author named A. N. Wilson in the London press. Wilson is a well-known author. He has written biographies of Jesus, the apostle Paul and C.S. Lewis. He doesn’t care for any of them very much. He is a lapsed Christian, by the way, a former clergyman with a sort of a bitter tongue. He said, “It is true that in the United States of America there are a great many intelligent people;’ he reluctantly conceded that. “However, almost all of them are located in the big cities of the eastern seaboard. When you get out to the midlands and places like Kansas, the insularity and stupidity of the people is beyond belief. There they soak up religious nonsense along with their chicken wings and fries.’ What was delightful about that was that their culinary standards were as unsatisfactory as their religion and their science!

Age-Old Controversy Denied

Amazingly, the authorities of the scientific world and of the popular science world acted as if they had never heard of a distinction between micro-evolution and macro-evolution, or any controversy about whether it was legitimate to extrapolate from finch beak variation and the like to a grand story of how plants and animals emerged in the first place. Now, that controversy has been in science for a very long time, and, in fact, it is rather easy to quote distinguished authorities from the world of official science who have recognized and even said that it is unreasonable to extrapolate from the small-scale variations that scientists actually observe to a large-scale creation mechanism that actually brings new organs and new capacities into existence. They said that science has to work on discovering something better because they don’t have it yet.

For example, Stephen Jay Gould, probably the most famous of American evolutionary popularizers and teachers, wrote in a notorious article in 1980 in the professional literature that “the view that all evolution is due to nothing more than an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species’ -that’s micro-evolution extrapolated- “had beguiled me with its unifying power when I was a graduate student, but since then I have been watching it slowly unravel as a description of evolution.’ He said, “If that is what Darwinian theory means as an overall theory, a general theory, of evolution, then that theory as a general proposition is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.’

And there are many others. It has been well-recognized that this controversy exists, and it is not unreasonable to ask that question, provided you ask it within the philosophical limits that mainstream science will tolerate.

When Dr. Maxine Singer, president of the Carnegie Institution and a very prominent molecular biologist, responded to the Kansas action on behalf of the scientific community in the Washington Post, she said that, in fact, there was nothing irrational about this question. She said that members of the school board seemed to think that critical comments about details of evolution from some scientists indicated that there was a problem, but then they showed how irrational they were by admitting that you could get variations of all kinds within populations and species, and yet denying that this showed that you could have new species emerge, such as when humans emerged from ape ancestors.

Jonathan Weiner, author of The Beak of the Finch, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been highly praised by the scientific establishment for its reliability, said that he could not understand how Kansas farmers could possibly be opposing evolution when they knew that their cotton crops were being eaten up by insects which had become resistant to insecticides. They were denying evolution, even though it was a vital factor in what was happening to their agriculture.

Well, of course, one thing that Kansas farmers do know is that insects become resistant to insecticide. But insects becoming resistant to DDT is microevolution, the very stuff that they were going to continue to teach in Kansas. They also know that you don’t grow cotton in Kansas. What they doubt is that the cows that they do cultivate emerged from primitive ancestors or bacteria or protozoa by the same processes by which insects become resistant to insecticide.

So there was this odd situation of these people in Kansas trying to state a controversy, trying to state some objections that made sense and had some basis even in the literature, who were being told that this was a totally irrational and absurd thing to do; they were effectively stonewalled.

Underlying Religious Agenda

Another area in which the objectors were stonewalled was their feeling that what was being put over was a religious agenda, and that the theory of evolution-that is, the theory that purely natural forces were responsible for creating everything-was believed and promoted by the scientific authority as much to get God out of the picture as for anything that they would consider a specifically scientific reason. Of course this also was denied, and the editorials again and again described this as a simple misunderstanding. “All we are doing is describing how things happened. We are not saying that this wasn’t God’s mechanism of creation,’ they said.

The chancellor of the University of Kansas denounced the Board of Education, saying that to suggest there were any religious implications in the teaching of evolution was to insult all those devout Christian scientists of the state who were teaching evolution. This, they were told, was really not an issue at all. It was just a misunderstanding on their part to raise the question.

Now, this seemed very odd to the protesters, because you can go into every bookstore and you can buy books by leading authorities of evolution, like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Bennett, Stephen Jay Gould, and Professor Edward Wilson of Harvard, which make exactly the argument that evolutionary science has made-showing that it is irrational to continue to imagine that God is our creator, that an intelligent, purposeful being brought about our existence for a purpose.

Why All the Fuss?

So what’s going on here? Why is it, do you think, that a relatively minor action of rebellion like this, having to do with nothing but what was going to be required on the state tests of high school seniors in the state of Kansas, became such a national media event that it even entered the presidential campaign? All the candidates had to take a stand on it. This led to more concern on the scientific establishment’s part, by the way, because the Republican candidates tended to say, “Local control is good; national control is bad. Let the people of Kansas do what they like.’ Much more alarming to the scientific establishment was that Vice President Gore took a stand on it and said, in his first reaction, that he didn’t see anything wrong with what the Kansas board was doing, that local control was okay with him, and that why couldn’t they teach both creation and evolution in an even-handed way? This led to an amusing week in which Gore was pummeled in the Washington Post and no doubt privately by his friends in the Democratic party. His position evolved purposelessly and mindlessly day by day. He said, “Oh, I only meant that they could teach it in the separate courses in religion but not in science,’ and then somebody told him that they don’t have those courses, and it would be unconstitutional if they did. Finally he said that the Kansas board was dead wrong, and he stood by the science educators.

So this became an issue in the presidential campaign. It became an international press issue. It certainly bothered the scientific establishment enormously. The question is: Why? I hope you are not so naive as to think even for a moment that the newspaper editors of New York, Chicago, Paris, London, and Hong Kong spend most of their time worrying about the details of high school curricula in the state of Kansas. They probably do not know, nor do they care, if the Kansas schools teach calculus or even algebra, if they require students to read a play of Shakespeare, or probably any other of these specific educational issues. What is a matter of concern is not what the high school students are learning in a particularly minor state, but the appearance of a popular revolt against a view of philosophy that has a dominant and extremely important status in our culture as a whole-in the universities, in the law, in the media culture, and in the culture in its entirety.

A Popular Revolt Against Natural Philosophy

The dominant philosophy says that fundamentally the only rational way to understand the world is to understand it in terms of natural forces and natural events, excluding anything which can be described as supernatural. Very central to this philosophical position is the theory of evolution, which is the essential mainstay of its creation story. If you are going to have an understanding of the world which depends only on natural factors, then you have to have a way in which nature can do its own creating. That requires a process of evolution by which simple things become more complex things, by which life in the first instance emerges from non-living chemicals in some kind of a pre-biotic soup by purely natural material forces. Without any supernatural agent guiding the process, inspiring it, or inserting anything into it, these purely natural forces take life all the way to the enormous diversity and complexity which it now has.

Indeed, that principle that nature had what it takes to do its creating and actually did do its own creating, is what all the leading authorities of evolutionary science agree upon, even though, if you are familiar with the professional literature, they are at war over every detail of this theory. Their understanding is that any attempt to abandon the basic principle that natural forces did the creating would be a retreat into superstition and fantasy.

That is why the Kansas educators were seen as taking us back to an age of superstition, back to the dark ages, as being something like flat-earthers. Make no mistake about it, those Kansas Board of Education members did have the intention of challenging this naturalistic worldview, because they believed that the truth about our existence was that we are created through the agency of a supernatural being who has a purpose for our lives and who cares about what we do. That is why they thought it important to challenge a naturalistic story which, in their opinion, went well beyond what scientific evidence would justify.

So that is the controversy in Kansas, and how it got into politics. You can see that at both the political level and at the secondary school education level it is quite a formidable issue that has people very exercised and very worried. The scientific leaders, the journalistic leaders and the university leaders are very worried that this kind of revolt might spread. It adds to their worry when they read the public opinion polls showing that only 10 percent of the country accepts fully the naturalistic theory of evolution, although another 40 or so percent believes in a God-guided evolution, which is really neither evolution nor creation, or some mixture of the two. They are very concerned when they read that the polls say that two-thirds of the public consistently says that they see no reason why creation and evolution should not be taught as alternatives in the educational system in an even-handed way, with people making up their own minds. And they get most concerned when they see presidential candidates reflecting something of the same view that the general public takes.

The Nature of Nature Conference

I think it is time now to leave the secondary school level and tell you about a controversy which is in a very general way the same as the Kansas controversy which is coming into the university level.

Next month at Baylor University in Texas—it’s a Baptist university which has really become highly secularized in the past few decades—a conference on naturalism will be held, directed by some of my colleagues in what we call the Intelligent Design Movement. I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a moment. It is one of the most amazing conferences I have ever seen announced, both in terms of the subject matter which it will cover and the list of people who have agreed to come. It is an extremely powerful, high-level conference.

The title of the conference is: “The Nature of Nature,” and the general theme is, “Is naturalism true, or does nature itself point to the existence of something outside of nature?” Here is the question that is presented in the prospectus for this conference next month: “Is the universe self-contained, or does it require something beyond itself to explain its existence and internal function?” Going on with the description: “Philosophical naturalism takes the universe to be self-contained, and it is widely presupposed throughout science. Even so, the idea that nature points to something beyond itself has recently been reformulated with respect to a number of issues:consciousness, the origin of life, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics at modeling the physical world, and the fine-tuning of universal constants are just a few of the problems that critics have claimed are incapable of purely naturalistic explanations. ” It goes on to say to how this will be addressed in many ways.

There will be a number of prominent philosophers and historians discussing the philosophy and history of naturalism in science, including Alvin Plantinga, Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin, Ernan McMullin of Notre Dame. The first major plenary session will have a debate between the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, perhaps today the world’s most prominent physicist—I’ve debated him at the University of Texas a few times—and my good friend Henry F. Schaefer III. Doctor Schaefer is one of the world’s leading quantum chemists and a proponent of intelligent design, from the University of Georgia. The issues of biological complexity and information in biological systems, which is really the key to it, will be addressed by my colleague Michael Behe, the biochemist from Lehigh University, author of Darwin’s Black Box, and a proponent of the view that molecular systems in biology are irreducibly complex. Irreducible complexity is the idea that molecular systems contain many complex parts, all of which have to be present for any one of them to do anything useful, so a step-by-step natural mindless process can’t put them together. He will be debating Christian de Duve, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, and a leading proponent of materialist evolution in the origin of life.

There will be a debate on the origin of biological information from Sahotra Sarkar, a brilliant young philosopher of science from the University of Texas at Austin, and my colleague Stephen Meyer of Whitworth College, a proponent of the view that DNA information is full of complex-specified information which cannot be produced without intelligence.

Another leading speaker will be Simon Conway Morris, one of the world’s most prominent paleontologists. Perhaps you have read Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Wonderful Life, the history of the Cambrian explosion and the Burgess shale fossils; Simon Conway Morris is the paleontologist who actually did all that work that Gould got so famous for reporting on. He has had a lot of quarrels with Gould about it since, and he is moving very strongly towards our view. I am very interested in seeing exactly what he says. John Searle, my colleague at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the world’s leading philosophers and a strong materialist—an opponent of intelligent design, at least I presume—will be there arguing. And a lot of other very, very famous people.

This conference is a much more sophisticated version of the popular controversy that rose out of Kansas, and it is coming into the high university world with debate and discussion among the very highest level of academic superstars. A very thrilling event.

The Philosophical Agenda

What is the popular revolt all about, in a nutshell?Obviously there is a lot of reading to do to get it all, but I would say that the essence can be stated fairly simply. It is an attempt to change the agenda, not only by which the whole subject of biological evolution has been discussed, but the agenda of the philosophical system that dominates the university as a whole, not only in the scientific department, but every bit as much in the humanities and in the social sciences—and through these departments dominates the culture as a whole.

What is the agenda to be changed?Well, the philosophical paradigm that is being challenged at Baylor at the university level, and was being challenged at the popular and political level in the Kansas episode, is the philosophy of scientific naturalism, sometimes just called “modernism. ”As I have already indicated, it starts with the assumption that nature is all there is, or if nature isn’t all there is, it is all we can have objective knowledge of. It therefore follows that the task of rationality is to explain everything in nature, including human beings and their behavior, on the basis of the kinds of things which are accessible to scientific study—on the basis of the natural causes and factors that science can take into account.

In this way of thinking, to put any role to a supernatural creator, to God, is to move to the irrational or to the non-rational. God is still important in people’s lives as a subjective factor, according to this philosophy, but it is not something about which we can have objective knowledge. Therefore, it is not something that can be introduced into the public school system or into the universities, where we deal with knowledge, not subjective beliefs. It is because of the dominance of this philosophical system that in the later part of the twentieth century, in sharp contrast to what American society was like in earlier periods, it has been national policy to enforce the exclusion of God and of all issues deemed to come under the heading of religion from public education.

Religious issues are also excluded in any meaningful way from the universities. Of course, it is possible in a university to study certain things about God; you can take a course in the Bible or in the history of the Bible, or religions of the world, or whatever. But understand how that is done and with what perspective it is done. It is unthinkable that a modern secular university or research university—indeed, it is practically unthinkable that a religious university, such as a Catholic university—would have a department of theological science or a department of theological knowledge. What it would have is a department of religious studies, perceived as a branch of anthropology, essentially, or sociology or psychology—perhaps abnormal psychology. It would study the religions of the various peoples of the world on the grounds that they are subjective systems with some cultural importance, which are all to be judged on the basis of their effect on people’s lives. You do not study these on the grounds that they might be objectively true, in the sense that the theory of evolution is deemed to be objectively true. God is a part of subjective belief, of religious belief and practice. To put it in the simplest form, it is something that belongs on Sunday in your church, but not in the laboratory or in the classroom during the workaday world, where we try to figure out what really happened. This is the definition that distinguishes between knowledge and subjective belief, and puts God and religious belief squarely in the latter camp.

It is because of this philosophical understanding that it was deemed to be such a bad practice—indeed, such an offensive and superstitious and altogether impermissible practice—to raise in a classroom the question of whether you really need a creator, whether you really need God to get life started and to get life from the bacterium to the butterfly to the giraffe to the redwood tree to the human being. If a student or anyone else raises that question and says, “Do you really need God to get life started or to do these other things?” the answer will be, “Sorry, this is a class in science and you are bringing religion into it. We don’t talk about religion here, because here we are talking about what really happened, or what really might have happened, and we couldn’t possibly have any evidence for the view that you are taking. If it makes you feel good, if it makes you a better person to think that God is somehow behind the creative process, you may do that. But that may not come into the area of the university where we talk about objective evidence that we all can see, because you couldn’t possibly have any objective evidence for something which is supernatural. It could only be something that you would believe in on the basis of faith.”

This is the naturalistic understanding, and it is taken for granted, as I said, not only in the scientific departments; it is also taken for granted in the history department, it is taken for granted in the sociology department, and in all the other departments of the university.

Intelligent Design Movement

What, however, if it happened that this understanding were false?What if it were based on a misunderstanding?Well, that is exactly the claim of the Intelligent Design movement, whose ideas are the subject of the investigation and debate that will occur at this Baylor conference, and I am sure at many subsequent ones. The argument of the Intelligent Design movement is that actually it is an objective fact that organisms are intelligently designed—it is not a mere subjective belief that someone might hold;it an objective fact which is inferred from evidence which is available to everyone. And this argument is based, not on scriptures, not on prayer, not on mystical states of mind, but on an unbiased analysis of the evidence of what organisms are.

To put it very briefly, even the simplest organism—a bacterial cell, a single-celled creature, for example—is a masterpiece of miniaturized complexity, a miniaturized chemical factory, far more complex than machines that human beings can produce, and it has a lot of very different and very complicated functions. All the thousands and millions of proteins have to go around, each to its specific place. A scientist recently got a Nobel prize for discovering what is called the “zip code” sequences on the proteins, which are called that because they address the protein to the area of the cell that it is supposed to go to do its next job. Something has got to write those zip codes. Something has got to read them. Something’s got to interpret what the next job is. In short, there has to be a tremendously complex program of some kind, little understood though it is, for all these life systems to operate. And this vast information is the thing whose existence has to be explained.

Is “Change” Evolution?

According to the Intelligent Design perspective, the great error that evolutionary science has made is to imagine that the thing which needs to be explained is merely change, that evolution is change. That is why the textbooks will tell you, “You want to see evolution in action? We can show you examples of change!”

Evolution is defined as change in the gene frequencies or the genetic composition of a particular population. Gene frequencies are continually changing as new organisms are born, as old ones die. You can see change or variation in physical characteristics when in a population there are sometimes more dark-colored moths and sometimes more light-colored moths. You can see change in a finch population when sometimes the average sizes of the beak is a little bit larger and sometimes a little bit smaller from year to year, depending on the rainfall or drought conditions. You can breed dogs and get variation out of these forms. All of these are relatively little amounts of change. The assumption is that if you can get little change in a little period, then in a massive period of time—millions and billions of years, which was available to evolution—you can get big change. Little change adds up to big change, and macroevolution is merely microevolution extrapolated over time, which is, of course, exactly the position the scientific establishment took in response to the Kansas debate.

Evolution is Creation of New Information

But the Intelligent Design movement says change is not what it is about. Change is just change. What you need is the creation of new, complex genetic information. The analogy here is to the software in a computer. What makes a computer a computer is not the metal that it is composed of, just as what makes a living organism a living organism is not the chemicals of which it is composed—it is the information that directs its process. The information that directs the complex operation of the cell must be at least as complex as the information that directs the operation of your personal computer—the Windows or Macintosh operating system, which, of course, is equivalent to an enormously long and detailed instruction book written in digital code, but we could as well imagine it as written in the English language.

Random forces, chance forces, do not produce long sequences of meaningful instructional text. That can be experimentally verified and mathematically proven. Neither do law-directed processes produce long sequences of meaningful text, because for the text to be meaningful it must be aperiodic—that is, non-repeating. Just think of any text you like—the phone book, the plays of Shakespeare, the Bible, or Windows 2000. In all of these cases, it would not contain a lot of meaning if it were just the same thing over and over again. A book which was written by law would be repetitive. You can do it easily; just put a macro in your word processor saying, “Repeat the word ‘law’ over and over again until the printer runs out of paper.” You see?You produce, not a complicated instruction book, but a meaningless, repetitive book. It is very boring. And it isn’t going to get more interesting, no matter how much time you give it, because the very law that gives you that minimal organization prevents you from getting anything more.

The argument of the Intelligent Design movement is that if we are allowed to consider the evidence of biology impartially, without bias, it points to the need of an intelligent cause just as surely as the information in the personal computer points to the need for the existence of Bill Gates and his army of software engineers. And if you do not believe that intelligent causes operated in biology, which is your right as a citizen, you don’t believe it for some reason that has to do with something other than the evidence. You don’t believe it because you are not willing, for whatever reason, to follow the evidence to its logical conclusion.

When the Kansas state Board of Education, attempting in its way to capture some of this view, said that one of the problems with microevolution as a model for macroevolution was that natural selection does not create new genetic information, they were not standing against science. They were not trying to censor science. They were trying to raise a vital and important scientific question, which the rulers of the scientific enterprise are trying to keep suppressed—that is, the problem of creating information and the embarrassing fact is that there is no known or likely to be discovered natural process which is capable of creating the information.

New Ideas on the Table

That is just an outline of the Intelligent Design theory. People will have different degrees of resistance to it, and if you are strongly of the view that natural selection and mutation, law and chance, can do it all, you won’t be convinced to the contrary by my brief exposition. But this argument, and many others that build on it in a more complex way, is the subject of the Baylor conference, and is the subject of the books we are writing. Those of us in the Intelligent Design movement are very, very confident, and we are getting more and more people all the time to be confident with us, that if we are able to get the issue squarely on the intellectual table, our arguments will prevail.

I often say, “Winning the argument is not a problem. The problem is getting the argument started.” The great obstacle has been not people who say, “We have evidence that can prove you wrong,” but rather those who insist, “Saying that intelligent causes operated in biology is religion and not science, and therefore ineligible for consideration, regardless of the evidence.” The vehemence with which that issue is presented is perhaps one of the most convincing reasons for believing that once we get past that issue, we are going to win on the merits. People wouldn’t be so eager to keep us off the table if they knew what to do with us once we are on the table.

Well, we are on the table now, and so we’ll get a chance to try it out. I think you will be seeing within the next few years just how powerful our case is and how difficult it is going to be to counter. There are theoretical reasons in the nature of complex, specified, non-repeating, aperiodic information which explain why you wouldn’t expect it to be produced by a combination of law and chance—purely natural processes—and that is why there is such an overwhelming lack of evidence that it actually is produced by those processes. It is not simply a matter of a lack of evidence, although there is a lack of evidence. There is actually a strong, positive, logical case that complex specified information of the kind required to operate a computer or an organism requires an intelligent cause.

The History of Naturalistic Philosophy

I titled this talk “Why Naturalism Rules the Academic Mind . . .And Why It Shouldn’t.” One has to go through a lot of preliminaries to get to the point, but I’ve already indicated to you that the philosophy of naturalism, often called modernism, is a philosophy that has become entirely dominant in the intellectual cultures around the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

As to the matter of a naturalistic philosophy governing the university as a whole, this is a tremendous contrast from what our universities were like in the nineteenth century, particularly the early nineteenth century, but also the later. For most of American history it was taken for granted that the basic framework of reality was the biblical framework of reality, shared by Christians of all denominations and also religious Jews. That is to say that we were created by an intelligent being with a purposefor our lives and for humanity. Because this was the creation story, it was assumed that there can be knowledge of things like truth, beauty, and goodness, and the mission of the university was to transmit that knowledge in all areas.

In the earlier nineteenth century the institutions of higher education placed a great emphasis on teaching theology. Later on, that became de-emphasized, and in the twentieth century in place of theology you get the idea that we learn what life is about and how life is to be lived and how to be wise in matters of value, of truth, beauty and goodness, from great works of literature and from studying the history and the great people of history.

It is really in the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of the two world wars and the tremendous impetus that this gave to science, because scientific technology was so important in winning the wars, and due to the tremendous effect that this had on intellectual developments generally, that the model of the university, the model of higher education, and then to some extent of education at all levels, became the technical model. You have universities like the University of California that are seen centrally as scientific-research enterprises in which the faculty is doing research and making new discoveries, publishing papers, and so on. The departments outside of the sciences try to be as much like that as possible, so that you get into social science. You get literary people trying to make new discoveries and publish original research, and this effort as indicating the central purpose of the university.

No Basis for Value Judgments

In the second half of this century, the scientific enterprise and way of thinking about things became so dominant that it became the model of knowledge as a whole. This has had certain consequences, which you can see working all around you. If our model of reality is that nature is all that there is or that we can have knowledge of, and nature is a closed system of material causes and effects, and we must learn about those material causes and effects through empirical investigation, then it is very difficult to see how we can have knowledge about matters of value. Naturalistic science gives us knowledge of facts, at least when it is done right. If you know the facts of how a system of cause and effect operates, then you may know how the world was created. But what you can’t say is whether it is good. You see, only a personal evaluator can say whether it is good.

Science has no knowledge of moral right or wrong, of beauty or ugliness, and no way to find a method which can make those into determinations of objective knowledge. So we find that the value areas of the university, the arts and the humanities, where we talk about people and their values, become areas with very great difficulty in defining their mission. The engineering departments know exactly what they are about and are highly successful. But look at the literary departments. One of the most acute things that has been said about our culture was said by a prominent Chinese scholar:that it is a culture which combines “technological optimism with literary despair.”

You see, our computers get better and better. The science that produces things like that gets better and better. That is the technological optimism. But if you go into the literary departments, you find that it is very hard for anyone to explain the difference between good and bad literature, something that used to be taken for granted. Why isn’t what one group of people likes just as good as what another group of people likes?Why shouldn’t literature mean whatever the reader wants it to mean?Why shouldn’t literary departments degenerate into questions of power-seeking and politicization?Indeed, this is something that has been remarked on throughout the country and the world as a tendency in those very departments. And it’s not surprising, once you understand that the university, and the culture as a whole, operates on a model of knowledge in which we can have knowledge only of matters of fact and in which matters of value must be matters only of subjective opinion.

Why do our public schools have such a hard time teaching questions of ethics and morality?Why do they tend, whatever their intentions, to retreat into something that usually goes under a name like “values clarification”?Clarify your values; make up your own mind. Again, it is a predictable result of the model of knowledge that we have. It was first thought that God would become just a matter of subjective belief and there could be no knowledge about God. But it turns out that when God is out of the picture, a lot more than that is also out of the picture in terms of any possibility of knowledge.

It seems to me that universities are ripe for a reconsideration of exactly the knowledge base that they have worked on. I know that the chancellor at Berkeley right now is very concerned about the absence of any value basis for the university, and he is trying to get the faculty to take this up seriously in faculty committees and institutions. But, of course, we are the ones who created the problem in the first place. How can we address it within the philosophical limits that we have?

Avoiding Religious Strife

So, now, into this world in which there is all this confusion and subjectivity in the area of value, while there is all this optimism and progress in the area of technology, we find that a major challenge is being mounted in academia to the basic creation story that underlies the philosophical paradigm that rules us. We find that there are scholars, scientists and Ph.D.s in a variety of disciplines who are saying, “Wait a minute!The view that God is outside of objective knowledge was prematurely determined. While science may not be able to tell us anything about what the Creator expects of us, it can tell us, via subjective evidence, that there was an actual need for a creator. The real creation story is not the creation of matter, whether it is from a big bang or a chemical soup or whatever. Matter is one thing that exists. Matter is important. But the much more important creation story is the creation of information, and you cannot get a story about the creation of information from matter in mindless motion, or from a combination of chance and physical law.” And this is a group which is confident that it has the intellectual case to win that point as it begins to get on the mainstream academic stage.

There is another factor in this circumstance, which I think is very important sociologically and culturally, which I have to mention before I conclude. I described the change from a theistic concept of reality to a naturalistic one that happened in the twentieth century, and I think that it is going to be a change back in the other direction in the twenty-first. But I don’t mean to imply that the naturalistic understanding was altogether bad. I think it was mistaken in very basic ways, but it is also understandable.

One of the things that makes it particularly understandable is the history of religious strife which occurred in preceding centuries—in particular, the wars that grew out of the Reformation in Europe, although we actually had very little of that, if any, in the United States. That memory is still strong, and it is really easy to understand why people faced with that tradition of bitter, cruel conflict would say, “Can’t we get away from all of this by putting God off the stage altogether and saying we’ll just have an Enlightenment rationality that depends only on what we can see?Won’t that be a more peaceful world, at any rate, whether or not it is a true understanding of reality?”I can understand that urge very much.

One of the things that is happening, which I think is changing this situation is that people are realizing that some of the knowledge that we thought we had gained from that naturalistic understanding is really inadequate. It simply isn’t true. It doesn’t tell us how we came into existence. Another thing that is happening is that the divisions that created those conflicts are becoming much more faint, and the movement that I am describing—the Intelligent Design movement—is inherently and by its nature an extremely ecumenical movement.

I can illustrate this with specific people. Here I am, an elder in the Presbyterian church, a very mainstream Protestant denomination. My right-hand man, the person who is taking this thing to the next step, Michael Behe, the biochemist from Lehigh University, is a Roman Catholic, and I love to say he is the real thing, too—eight kids, all homeschooled. Number three is William Dembski, a convert to Antiochan Orthodoxy. The movement throughout brings in the Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, the Protestant, and also the Jewish element. David Berlinski, who has written for the Intelligent Design movement in Commentary magazine, is a rather skeptical Jew. We even have people who don’t have a religious belief at all, but who have a strong inclination to oppose the bullying of orthodoxy that scientific naturalism, materialism and Darwinian evolution have imposed on us.

Paradigm Shift

I have to share with you a letter I received from an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, a mathematician who has contributed to evolutionary studies. I have never heard from him before, but he has some very interesting views on the completeness of the fossil record, which he describes to me in this letter. He says, “I don’t have any religious beliefs at all. I am, however, irked by the extent to which my devout Darwinist colleagues in psychology consider that no sensible educated person could possibly have any doubts about their big theory. They tend to talk and write as if any doubter must be a barefoot Baptist from Tennessee with an IQ of 85. So it troubles them that I wear shoes, do not have a Southern accent, my IQ is more like 185, and I don’t attend church. The brethren in one of the top half dozen psychology departments in the world are usually scrupulously honest about theories and evidence, but on this topic they seem blissfully unaware that strong arguments and evidence against evolution even exist, and show no curiosity even to read about them.” How remarkable!

I am getting communications like this constantly every week. So I can tell you that we are in for a very exciting twenty-first century, intellectually. People tend to assume that things are going to go along the way they always have, that our knowledge gains will be incremental, that we’ll proceed in basically the same direction. But that is not the lesson of history. History sometimes takes great turns and gives us great surprises, and I think it is about to do so again. The twentieth century was the century of materialism. Everyone will quote the same figures as the intellectual leaders who made the twentieth century:Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche. Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God; Darwin supplied the murder weapon in the theory of evolution by natural selection of a mindless, purposeless process that is being so zealously protected by the National Academy of Science against the revolt of the people of Kansas or of the professors of my kind; Marx applied this knowledge to society and told us what he said was the science of society; and Freud, of course, stands for the attempt to understand the mind in the same kind of terms.

But these have all dropped off. Freud and Marx have lost all of their scientific standing, and now Darwin is very much vulnerable. The influence of Darwinian evolution and of the materialistic theory of creation that it represents will last only as long as it holds its power in government and in the media, where it can misrepresent all of its critics, saying they are all just Bible-thumpers who ignore scientific evidence. As long as it can ridicule people, as happened to this professor in Minnesota, as long as it can maintain these weapons, it will hold its authority.

But that can’t last very long, because it is running up into new ideas. It is running up into questions that it can’t answer. They are now up on the stage, and it is going to be a lot of fun to see how things progress.

Question & Answer Period

Question 1: What do you mean when you say that intelligent design is an objective fact? What practical evidence do you have to substantiate such a radical claim?

Dr. Johnson: Actually, it’s not a radical claim, because in our normal everyday lives we make the distinction between different kinds of causes—chance, law, and design. Take a die that you throw. It’s six-sided. You throw it and it comes up with one number or another. That is chance. But it might be a loaded die that always comes up six. That’s law. That is the law of gravity and the weight. But the die itself is designed. If you find one of these things, you know that it wasn’t produced by a combination of law and chance. You know that it’s a human design.

Science in many areas determines design by objective methods. An archeologist in a cave may have something that looks like it might be a painting, or it might just be erosion. It is sort of faded and indistinct. But you can tell by examination whether it is designed by cavemen or by the product of natural forces. You see rocks that have names like “Castle Rock,” which looks vaguely like a castle. But you know that is not a designed castle. But if you go to Mount Rushmore and you see those faces, that is a design.

One great contribution of my colleague William Dembski is his book, Intelligent Design, at the popular level, and the design inference at the mathematician’s level. He has sort of quantified this and explained how it can be seen. But you don’t need all the math in order to get the concept.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of intelligent design being determined in science is the SETI program, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is particularly ironic, because the arch-materialist and agnostic Carl Sagan was so involved in it, and he was looking for the presence of intelligent aliens in outer space. You set up these radio telescopes as in the movie Contact and you get the signals. You expect three kinds of signals. Most of the stuff you get is just noise. It is just random. It is chance radio waves of some kind, electromagnetic static. Sometimes you get a regular signal and they get excited about that. One famous example turned out to be a pulsar. It is a rotating system, so it is sending a regularized signal. That is law. When you see that it is that simple repetitive pattern, you recognize law.

They never actually have gotten the design signal yet, but that is what they are looking for and they know how to recognize it. But in the movie Contact it was a digitally coded set of prime numbers, numbers divisible only by themselves and one. It is 1, 3, 5, 7, 11 and so on. When you get a long enough sequence you know that that is not the product of law or chance or any combination. If you got a segment that said, “To be or not to be—that is the question,” it would be even easier to see, but it is exactly the same principle.

So in science in general there is no reluctance to determine the difference between law and chance, or law/chance combinations, and designed sequences. The only reason it is not done in biology is philosophical. It is because it would point to the dreaded “G” word. In fact, scientists will talk about design when they think they can get away with it.

A notorious example was the arch-atheist Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and one of the world’s most famous scientists, who gave up on his attempt to determine the origin of life. He said it is too complicated and had not enough time to evolve, and you just couldn’t get it out of a law/chance combination. So it must have been sent here by space aliens. You see?This is a materialist version of supernatural creation, because the aliens are just as invisible as God. But, again, the reasoning is basically sound in that you know what law can do, you know what chance can do, and if you’ve got something that they can’t do in combination, and clearly can’t do, you have evidence for design.

In the movie Contact, notice that the Sagan clones were able to determine the existence of design even though they had no independent evidence of a designer. Apply the same logical structure to biology and you get intelligent cause.

Question 2: Creation of information is easily accomplished by duplication of existing genes. Once two copies of a gene exists, one is free to be modified and take on a new function. This mechanism makes an extremely explicit prediction, that genes should be closely related to other genes in the same organism. In this day and age of genomic science, where the DNA sequences of whole organisms are being seen, one thing is painfully clear:Genes exist in gene families. How do you explain this clear, successful prediction of natural selection?

Dr. Johnson: The answer is that it doesn’t have anything to do with information creation. I have no objection to gene duplication as a process. But it doesn’t have anything to do with information creation, and I can easily explain why. The way it is supposed to work is this. You have one gene and it can’t change in any radical way, because it is a functional gene, and if it did, it would go out of function, so there would be a disaster. But then the idea is that it duplicates, and so you have a duplicate gene, and the duplicate can change without disrupting the function, because there is still the original gene around, or the original gene can change and then the duplicate gene can take over the function. It doesn’t matter which. So you could have change without disrupting the function.

So far there is no problem with that. I mean, that is fine. But then the duplicate gene isn’t doing anything. So if it is getting mutations, those mutations are simply chance mutations. They are random. They are producing noise. They are not writing meaningful text.

Now, this is the theory of complex specified information—that many random changes don’t produce a sequence of prime numbers, they don’t produce a computer operating system, they don’t produce a page of Shakespeare or any other complex, specified, aperiodic information sequence. They don’t produce meaningful text.

All this is is a hypothetical way in which something could change without disrupting function, but it doesn’t explain information creation.

Question 3: Earlier during your talk, it seemed to me that you looked down on all the subjectivity that is encouraged by the Darwinist mindset—that because there is no absolute truthevery opinion is equally valid and there is no one correct opinion. Well, what many Darwinists are afraid of is that if Intelligent Design takes over, then people will try to establish an absolute truth and then try to force people to live their lives based on those truths. I’d like to know what you have to say about that.

Dr. Johnson: Well, one thing I have to say is that it is a very good and pertinent question, and it is one which I raised in my own way in the talk by saying that the movement to naturalism was, in a way, understandable because of the history of religious conflict. There were good reasons to be fed up with the church in the eighteenth century when all of this got started. They were allied with the landowners’ oppressive regimes. And there has been the history of religious wars. So I think a lot of people have had the idea that subjectivity and value is a good thing because it will lead to tolerance, that everybody will be tolerant if we have subjectivity and value, and then we can all agree on science because that is rational, and so we’ll have peace and tolerance.

Now, this turns out to be a mistake, at least in the long run. Value relativism does not lead to tolerance; it leads to power ideologies, because there is no way to reason about values, and yet somebody has got to prevail. The only way to prevail is to overpower the others, and that is what we see as a developing philosophy of political correctness in the university. It is not tolerance. It is very intolerant.

The second thing is that the scientific materialists themselves are intolerant and oppressive. They won’t allow anybody to question their system. They won’t allow open debate about it. They have to protect the fundamentals, so they become the oppressive church. Scientific materialists love to tell the story of the church and Galileo, showing that religion is a suppressive force. But if you just think about that, what Galileo was in trouble with was the academic establishment of his day. Our College of Cardinals is not a bunch of people in red hats and old robes; it is the National Academy of Sciences. They are the ones who enforce the orthodoxy in this area.

So at the present time, I would say Intelligent Design, in realizing the reality of God, is liberating from the intolerance and oppression that we are actually experiencing. But I want to add to that a word of caution. I don’t want to give the impression that I think, “Well, when we realize that God is real, our problems are over and everything will be good. ”We still have to worry about oppression. We have to worry about intolerance all the time from everybody. It is part of the human condition because of original sin. Theists are prone to oppress; atheists are prone to oppress; materialists have done the oppressing and the mass murder in our century—100 million under the Marxist form of materialism. So we need liberation from that, but we always have to worry about oppression. Anything can oppress.

Question 4: It seems as though it is somewhat easy for proponents of modernism to sort of sweep God underneath the rug, but it seems like it is more difficult for them to deny the existence of our thoughts. My question is, since it seems that it can be shown that thoughts aren’t identical to physical properties, then how does philosophical naturalism account for the nature of thoughts, if they are not physical?

Dr. Johnson: That’s a great question. I wrote a chapter about that in The Wedge of Truth, in which I go into the questions which I think should be on the table in the university, like whether or not natural processes can create genetic information, whether God is real or imaginary—that sort of thing. And one of them is whether the conscious, choosing self is an illusion, whether it exists or not.

The claim of materialism, or scientific naturalism, is that it would leave us with rationality, because we’d get rid of superstition. It is important for them to keep God out of reality because that means the reentry of superstition. We can only understand everything if everything is the product of material forces. The problem with that is that when you carry it out logically, the mind also becomes the product of material forces. Indeed, you find this in many of the recent books coming from the Darwinists and scientific materialists, like the work of Stephen Pinker, for example, at the popular level. He says the self is an illusion, as does Daniel Dennett. And Francis Crick writes that your thoughts are only the product of neurons firing in your brain; that’s all they are—it just depends on which neurons are firing. He doesn’t say, “My thoughts—my meaning Francis Crick’s thoughts—are just neurons firing in the brain.” I don’t think anyone would be interested in buying the book, if that were the case. But, in fact, when everything is explained in terms of physical causes, then even thoughts have to be explained in terms of physical causes if you are going to carry that out to its logical conclusion. That is what led Pinker and Dennett and Dawkins to conclude that the choosing self is an illusion, that our mind is just a bunch of different computers, evolved by natural selection, and they have to operate together to coordinate the whole body, and that created the illusion of a self, which doesn’t really exist. Our conscious thoughts are just rationalization. But, then, what becomes of science?It is just rationalization too!So I believe thatmaterialism is, in the end, self-canceling.

Question 5: If random chemical reactions can produce well-ordered molecules in the lab to explain geological and atmospheric mechanisms, do you believe these experiments are invalid to explain geological and atmospheric history?And, as a side to this, how is this different than the application of microevolution to macroevolution?

Dr. Johnson: You are talking about chemical reactions being able to explain things that are happening in the atmosphere, or chemistry being able explain how geology is operating, and is that valid to explain the history of the earth?And how does this relate to the micro-macro evolution distinction?[Yes.]

Well, you know, this is a question that is open for research, but I can give you my opinion. Clearly you can explain a lot through law and chance, through chemistry and chemical reactions and so on. On the other hand, when you get to really complicated things, it is very hard to be certain. Look at the scientific controversy today over global warming, and particularly over whether fossil fuel burning is contributing to it. You will find that one group of scientists says, “There is no argument about that. It is absolutely certain. It is as certain as the Darwinian theory of evolution.” But then you find there is a substantial dissenting community, and they have their own arguments. It is a very complicated thing to sort out, because it is enormously complex, and a lot of it appears to depend on computer modeling. Now, you know what computer modeling is like. It all depends on the input and whether it is reasonable or not. So you reach a realm of uncertainty.

Now, if you are talking about what happened in the realm of the past, the uncertainty is increased, because you have to make so many assumptions about the uniformity of processes, and we can never know for certain whether they are true. Probably all scientific statements about the remote past should be made cautiously. That is not to say they are not good science, or they are not reasonable inferences, but they probably should be made cautiously.

A friend of mine was recently at the American Museum of Natural History, and he went through the “History of the Earth and Life” exhibits. He noted that when they talk about what happened three billion years ago, they just state it as fact, with absolutely no doubt. One billion years ago–the same–absolutely fact, no doubt. They say, “This is exactly what happened.” But when they get to the last thousand years, they start to get cautious. They say, “Maybe this, maybe that—we just can’t say.” Now, why it is that they are so much more certain about what happened a billion years ago than they are about what happened a thousand years ago?Well, you can see why—there is a danger you’ll be proved wrong if you say something about a thousand years ago. Much of this speculative science is presented to us as fact all the time, and I think a much more cautious air would be wise.

Question 6: How come so many biologists believe in evolutionary theory?

Dr. Johnson: It is, of course, a fair question. If there is something wrong with this, why haven’t the biologists seen it?How can a law professor purport to question what all these experts in biology are saying?

There are a number of answers that I give to that. In the area of Darwinian evolution, all of the leading figures—from Darwin and Huxley at the beginning, to Gould and Dawkins today—wrote books for the general public. And none of them ever said in any of those books, “Don’t try to evaluate this because you need a Ph.D. in order to understand what we are talking about.” It wouldn’t have sold the books if they said that.

What they say, in fact, is:”You’ll see that this is absolutely true unless you are utterly ignorant, a religious fanatic, insane, or something like that. ”And I respond, “Well, I am the self-appointed representative of all the readers of those books explaining why I am not convinced.”

This actually is my field. You notice that what I am talking about in this lecture, what I write about in my books, is the fundamental assumptions that govern this field. The people who do evolutionary biology have assumed naturalism, they have assumed materialism, and so they come out with a materialistic picture of evolution because they have to. Logic requires it once you make those assumptions.

And so my job has been to identify the assumptions. I like to tell them that what they are doing is making a model of a materialistic creation story, but they have never really asked whether it is true. They are just asking whether it is the best materialist model that we can get. And because the materialist thinking is so deep in their assumptions, and they have been trained to accept it unquestioningly, they don’t question it. So it takes an outsider to question it and to bring those issues up.

This is not a matter of me invading some professional territory. It is the scientific elite who is coming and saying, “Every school child in America must be taught to believe this, not because they are going to be professional scientists, but because we want all the people to think as we do. As biologists we have authority to impose a worldview on the culture.” Well, as a law professor, I say they do not, and as a logical analyst, I say their thinking is cloudy!So I honor biologists or any other disciplinary specialists when they are speaking about things that they really know about because of their specialty. But when they are giving worldview pronouncements that do not come from their evidence, that they believe in despite the evidence, then it is the job of the outside critic to question that.

Question 7: I’m a little offended by the assumption that if one believes in evolution, that person must not believe in God. You seem to ignore the view that God could be guiding evolution, creating the mutations that appear random to us only because we can’t presume to understand God’s ways. Studying only the physical world by observable methods, i.e., the fossil record and genetics, does not mean that the person studying the world does not believe in God. Any thoughts?

Dr. Johnson: Oh, sure, I’ve got a lot of thoughts about that. I sometimes like to say that the question, “Isn’t it possible that God could have. . .” is the most boring question in the world, because the answer to it is always “Yes.” God is omnipotent, so I don’t need to hear the rest of it. I just know the answer is “Yes,” unless it is something like one of these logical paradoxes, “Can he make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it?” or nonsense like that. But certainly God could use a slow method like evolution. He could direct mutations while making it look as if they were random. He could have had a scheme to make it as hard as possible to figure that he was involved in it for some reason he hasn’t explained to us. All of that is within the realm of logical possibility, but it is not an illuminating way to think about the subject.

Here is the way to think about the subject:If Darwinian evolution—evolution by mutation and natural selection, a material process—is the answer, what is the question to which it is an answer?And the question to which it is an answer is, “How do you get the creating done without God?”You see, that is the question, the starting point from which the evolutionary scientists proceed, and God is assumed to be out of the picture.

Let’s just take one example. There are many like it. I don’t want you to think this is the only example, but here is a paradigm. Say I want to ask the question:Is it true that non-living chemicals have the power spontaneously to combine into a living organism? Can you get the spontaneous emergence of a living organism by natural processes from a pre-biotic soup of chemicals, or would that require an intelligent designer, a creator?Well, the answer to that question is:It is an improper question. You are not allowed to ask it in evolutionary science and chemical evolution, because the science is committed to a Godless system. So the answer is, “Of course we know for certain that non-living chemicals can produce a living organism. We know it happened at least once. How do we know it?Living organisms exist, and they could hardly exist, could they, if they couldn’t come into existence.” That’s why all the books and museum exhibits state as fact that chemical evolution produced life.

That is good science only if you know for sure that God couldn’t have had anything to do with it. And if God is in the picture, how can you make that conclusion?So if you say that, despite the failure of all the experiments, and despite the theoretical impossibility, we know that non-living chemicals did spontaneously produce a living organism, because God is totally out of the picture and so that is the only way it happened. And now, having concluded that, we say, “Isn’t it wonderful that God chose this method to bring about life”?That is incoherent thinking.

What you have to understand about Darwinian evolution is that the important thing about it is not that it is a slow process, a gradual process. That could easily be true of a divine creation, that it took a long period of time.That is not what is important about it. What is important about it is that it is mindless and purposeless, and it is that way because the science is assumed as ruling God out of the picture all the way.

Question 8: In one of your books you mentioned that not only was there such a God, but that his fingerprints were all over the place.

Dr. Johnson: The evolutionary scientists will tolerate, reluctantly, anybody who believes in God. They are not enthusiastic about, but it is permissible if you don’t claim that there is any evidence for it. Where you become an enemy is if you say there is objective evidence of it, which is exactly what the intelligent design people do say. Michael Behe says he doesn’t mind a long, gradual process that he’ll call evolution–you know, that’s fine with him–common descent and all that, but there is the irreducible complexity problem. Evolutionists don’t have a mechanism to create that. So God would have had to have put that all in that somehow. He is not a theistic evolutionist, in their view. He is a creationist because he thinks the irreducible complexity is objectively observable. That is the fingerprints on the evidence. That is what they will not allow. If you think you have the authority to tell God he can’t leave his fingerprints on the evidence, you are some kind of a theist in my view. Next question.

Question 9: Is divine revelation empirical evidence, and, if not, which is more valid in terms of what people should believe as truth?

Dr. Johnson: Well, the intelligent design movement stays away from the question of revelation altogether, because once you raise that topic you’ll never get back to the evidence. What we say is that, properly understood from an impartial evaluation of the evidence, the world of biology is “God-friendly” in the sense that it shows you the need for an intelligence. But it doesn’t tell you any more than that. It doesn’t tell you whether it is the God of the Bible. It doesn’t tell you whether God cares about what you do or anything like that. For that, you would need a communication from God.

However, the possibility that such a communication exists becomes much more plausible when you realize that you have been mislead about science having proved that God wasn’t involved in the creation. I personally believe that there is revelation, and I think that people who seek to find it will find it in the Scriptures and in prayer and in the other accoutrements of the Christian life. But that statement goes beyond the agenda of the intelligent design movement within the academic culture.

Question 10: How do you make the transition between “creation indicates a creator” and “that creator is the God of the Bible”?

Dr. Johnson: As the final question, that’s a great one. I address that in my book, The Wedge of Truth. It is both a necessary topic to address and a tricky one, because, as I have just finished explaining, I’ve been wanting to keep the issue on the evidence. The other side is trying to get off and talk about the Bible or revelation or religion and what you should do on Sundays and so on, but we want to talk about the actual evidence of biology and of nature.

But, in fact, you can’t leave it there. What is the point, if all you get to is an intelligent designer that you can’t know anything more about?What good is it, even if it is intellectually true?

Here is how I make the next step. I don’t go to the Genesis story, but I do go to the Bible, to one of the most impressive passages in the Scriptures—the opening of the gospel of John:”In the beginning was the Word.” You see, the Bible says that in the beginning was intelligence and meaning and purpose—the creative speech of God.

Now, is that true, or is that an illusion?The scientific materialists who dominate our culture, the university culture, assume that it is an illusion. It might sound nice, it may make you feel good, but it is not how things are. In fact, I’ve written a parody of the opening of the gospel of John to explain the dominant intellectual view of our time:”In the beginning were the particles in mindless motion, and the impersonal laws of science. And the particles somehow came together to form complex living stuff, and the stuff imagined God, but then discovered evolution.”

That is the mainstream view. If the particles evolved by a combination of law and chance, then God didn’t create man; man created God, imagine God, because we lacked the scientific knowledge that evolution is our real creator. When you discover evolution, then that is the death of God. Then you know God is an illusion.

But what if it works the other way, and you discover that it is naturalistic evolution that is the illusion?Well, then I would say the proper place to go is to another scripture of great intellectual content, which is Romans 1:18-23, which states that God’s invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and majesty, have always been visible in the things that were created. That’s intelligent design!

Richard Dawkins, the arch-atheist, knows that. He says, basically, “Biology is the study of very complex things that look as if they were designed by a creator for a purpose. But, of course, they weren’t, as we Darwinists know.” Francis Crick says biologists have to “remind themselves every day that what they study was not created; it evolved.” So it is evident to him too, but he won’t admit it. The Scripture says that all men are without excuse, but because they did not want to honor God as God, they turned to idolatry, as Paul puts it, “to images of mortal man and of beasts and reptiles and birds and things of the air.” They turned to idols—their own thoughts, their own theories, and the forces of nature.

That is the explanation of why the reality of God’s creation was denied and suppressed. It was not that evolutionary theory came out of the evidence—it was contrary to the evidence!It was a project to get God out of reality, and it has been partially successful, culturally, for a considerable period of time.

When you realize this, and you realize that reason for it, you have now invoked the sin problem. “In the beginning was the Word” is true scientifically as well as otherwise. In the beginning was intelligence and information. This fact was denied because it is always part of the human project to get rid of the Creator. We are out of the right relationship to that creator.

We’ve raised the sin problem, and now we have the question:”Is there a way out of that? Is there a way out of that sin problem, and back into right relationship with the Creator?”It can’t come through our theories or our unaided mental efforts. That is what got us into the problem in the first place. We can’t tell the difference between reason and rationalization. Our reason is corrupt.

Once we realize that, we know we’ve got to look elsewhere for a solution. At this point, I’d like to put another question on the table. It ought to be discussed, it ought to be considered, it ought to be an important question for debate and consideration in every aspect of society, including the university. It is the question that Jesus asked his disciples:”Who do the people say that I am?Who do you say that I am?”