Phillip E. Johnson
Phillip E. Johnson
Phillip E. Johnsonis a retired UC Berkeley law professor and author who is considered the father of the intelligent design movement. He became a Christian while a tenured professor. He is a critic of what he calls "Darwinism". By "Darwinism", he means "fully naturalistic evolution, involving chance mechanisms and natural selection". As a Christian, Johnson believes "that a God exists who could create out of nothing if He wanted to do so, but who also might have chosen to work...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
CountryUnited States of America
In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin.
A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin's theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin."
In short, it is not that evolutionary naturalists have been less brazen than the scientific creationists in holding science hostage, but rather that they have been infinitely more effective in getting away with it.
Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.
In the most important sense a creationist is a person who believes in creation, and that includes people who believe that Genesis is a myth and that creation involved a process called evolution and consumed billions of years.
Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation.
Modernist discourse [...] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.
Scientists have long known that Darwinism is false. They have adhered to the myth out of self-interest and a zealous desire to put down God.
A constitutional democracy is in serious trouble if its citizenry does not have a certain degree of education and civic virtue.