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Phillip E.
Johnson
Excerpts from Defeating Darwinism
by Opening
Minds
If somebody asks, "Do you
believe in evolution?" the right reply is not "Yes" or "No." It is: "Precisely
what do you mean by evolution?" That one word evolution can mean something so
tiny it hardly matters, or so big it explains the whole history of the universe.
(Ch. 3: Turning Up Your Baloney Detector, pp. 44-45)
EDUCATION
An
Education in Evolution Young people need to take advantage of the wonderful
educational opportunities our society offers, but they also need to protect
themselves from the indoctrination in naturalism that so often accompanies
education. Textbooks and other educational materials today take evolutionary
naturalism for granted, and thus assume the wrong answer to the most important
question we face: Is there a God who created us and cares about what we do?
Young people need to be prepared for the indoctrination, and for that they need
to know some things that the public schools aren't allowed to teach them.
(Introduction, p. 10)
If high-schoolers need a
good high-school education in how to think about evolution, professors and
senior scientists seem to need it just as badly. That's what this book aims to
give_a good high-school education in how to think about evolution. It's for
high-schoolers, college students, parents, teachers, youth workers, pastors and
also scientists whose education didn't encourage them to take a skeptical look
at the claims of Darwinian theory. (Introduction, p. 11)
Developing Good Thinking
Habits
Understanding evolution is mainly a matter of opening minds, of
freeing people to think about it as they would other important subjects. All it
really takes is precise definitions and good thinking habits. The skills you'll
develop in learning to understand evolution will come in handy for a lot of
other things too. Actually, you'll find out that they are the same skills that
scientists like Carl Sagan have advocated all along. It's just that we are going
to apply those skills to evolution, a subject that has for too long been
protected from critical thinking by law and academic custom. (Introduction, p.
12)
Educational
Censorship
It's an absurd situation, isn't it? Educators aren't allowed
to address the issues about which their students, and the general public, are
most concerned. When teachers challenge students to think about how their
worldviews affect their understanding of the creation-evolution controversy,
so-called civil liberties lawyers censor the teaching by threatening to bring a
lawsuit that the school district can't afford to defend. (Ch. 3: Turning Up Your
Baloney Detector, pp. 52)
The predictable result of
this one-sided educational and legal regime is that evolution has become the
focus of a culture war instead of a subject that can be discussed constructively
in educational institutions or in the political realm of negotiation and
compromise. The science educators teach the students that they were created by
evolution and that evolution is a purposeless and unsupervised natural process.
Of course those statements go far beyond the scientific evidence and state a
religious position, but educators also insist with a straight face that they are
not saying anything about religion or God. If they were addressing the subject
of religion, they would have to allow the other side to be argued. Therefore
they must not be addressing it. (Ch. 4: A Real Education in Evolution, p.
54)
SCIENCE
The
Official Statement on What Biology Teachers Believe
The 1995 official
position statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers
(hereafter NABT) accurately states the general understanding of major science
organizations and educators: "The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of
evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of
temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural
selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments." Or, in
the words of the famous evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson, "Man is the result
of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." (Ch. 1:
Emilio's Letter, p. 15)
The "Evolution" of
Corvettes
Here is [zoology professor Tim] Berra's explanation of
"evolution, which comes illustrated with photographs of automobiles in the
middle of the book:
Everything evolves, in the
sense of "descent with modification," whether it be government policy, religion,
sports cars or organisms. The revolutionary fiberglass Corvette evolved from
more mundane automotive ancestors in 1953. Other high points in the Corvette's
evolutionary refinement included the 1962 model, in which the original 102-inch
was shortened to 98 inches and the new closed-coupe Stingray model was
introduced; the 1968 model, the forerunner of today's Corvette morphology, which
emerged with removable roof panels; and the 1978 silver anniversary model, with
fastback styling. Today's version continues the stepwise refinements that have
been accumulating since 1953. The point is that the Corvette evolved through a
selection process acting on variations that resulted in a series of transitional
forms and an endpoint rather distinct from the starting point. A similar process
shapes the evolution of organisms.
Of course, every one of
those Corvettes was designed by engineers. The Corvette sequence_like the
sequence of Beethoven's symphonies or the opinions of the United States Supreme
Court_does not illustrate naturalistic evolution at all--. It illustrates how
intelligent designers will typically achieve their purposes by adding variations
to a basic design plan. Above all, such sequences have no tendency whatever to
support the claim that there is no need for a Creator, since blind natural
forces can do the creating. On the contrary, they show that what biologists
present as proof of "evolution" or "common ancestry" is just as likely to be
evidence of common design. (Ch. 4: A Real Education in Evolution, pp. 62-63)
Natural
Selection
Computer selection, like automobile design, illustrates
intelligent planning (authorship), not chance or survival of the fittest. It is
just as if an author were writing the target phrase, except that the author has
to wait a bit for the right letters to appear in the right spaces. The first
letters to appear are meaningless, and the computer knows which ones to select
only because it has the target text in its memory.
Natural selection, on the
other hand, is supposed to be mindless and hence incapable of pursuing a distant
goal. If natural selection could preserve a presently meaningless mutation
because it might become useful later on when other new mutations occur, this
would imply that evolution is a purposeful process, supervised by a preexisting
mind. As we have seen, supervised evolution is a gradualist version of
creationism. As materialists use the term, it is not evolution at all. (Ch. 5:
Intelligent Design, pp. 74-75)
Irreducibly Complex Black
Boxes
Molecular mechanisms are irreducibly complex. What this means is
simply that they are made up of many parts that interact in complex ways, and
all the parts need to work together. Any single part has no useful function
unless all the other parts are also present. There is therefore no pathway of
functional intermediate stages by which a Darwinian process could build such a
system step by step.
Molecular mechanisms, Behe
says, are as obviously designed as a spaceship or a computer. You can't explain
the origin of any biological capability (like vision) unless you can explain the
origin of the molecular mechanisms that make it work. 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. (Ch. 5: Intelligent Design, p. 77)
The Big Three: First Marx
and Freud . . .
Every history of the twentieth century lists three
thinkers as preeminent in influence: Darwin, Marx and Freud. All three were
regarded as "scientific" (and hence far more reliable than anything "religious")
in their heyday. Yet Marx and Freud have fallen, and even their dwindling bands
of followers no longer claim that their insights were based on any methodology
remotely comparable to that of experimental science. I am convinced that Darwin
is next on the block. His fall will be by far the mightiest of the three.
Darwinism in the West is in
much the same condition as was Soviet Marxism in its last days. Its power and
prestige rest not on any real scientific accomplishments but on the theory's
role in upholding the ruling philosophy. (Ch. 8: Stepping off the Reservation,
p. 113)
RELIGION
Why
Evolution Can't Be Theistic
The Darwinian theory doesn't just say that
God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and God
had nothing to do with it. (Ch. 1: Emilio's Letter, p. 16)
The important question is
not whether God "exists"; it is whether God cares about us, and whether we need
to care about God's purposes. Deism answers no to these questions. For that
reason even George Gaylord Simpson found deism to be perfectly consistent with
his Darwinian doctrine that our true creator is a purposeless material system.
(Ch. 1: Emilio's Letter, p. 17)
It Goes Both
Ways
Every scientific materialist who reads this will understandably want
to ask: "Are you willing to apply baloney detecting to religion, as well as
science? The answer is (emphatically) yes! I can't think of a better way to
introduce students to Christianity than to invite them to read the Gospels with
care and to ask all the tough questions. . . . Dealing with the tough questions
is a lifelong business, and the most important educational point is not to try
to spoonfeed students with oversimplified answers that won't stand the tests of
time and experience. (Ch. 4: A Real Education in Evolution, p. 65)
Faith
Faith is not
something some people have and others don't. Faith also isn't something opposed
to reason. Faith is something that everybody needs to get started in any
direction, and to keep going in the face of discouragement. Reason builds on a
foundation of faith. (Ch. 4: A Real Education in Evolution, p. 66)
A faith that has to be
protected behind walls is like a house built on sand. When the protection
ceases, the faith collapses. Faith is confirmed by testing and validated by
struggle in a world that gives a multitude of reasons for doubt. (Ch. 6: The
Wedge, p. 91)
What the Pope Actually
Said
Far from endorsing the materialist understanding of evolution that
dominates contemporary science, the pope pronounced that "theories of evolution
which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit
as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this
matter, are incompatible with the truth about man." (Ch. 6: The Wedge, p.
85)
How We Think about
God
As students grow more and more accustomed to assuming materialism and
naturalism in their academic work, the concept of creation by God gradually
tends to become less real to them. It is not so much that any single finding
undermines their faith; rather, the day-to-day practice of thinking in
naturalistic terms about academic subjects makes it awkward to think differently
when it comes to religion. (Ch. 6: The Wedge, p. 88)
When people are taught for
years on end that good thinking is naturalistic thinking, and that bringing God
into the picture only leads to confusion and error, they have to be pretty dense
not to get the point that God must be an illusion. This doesn't necessarily mean
that they become atheists, but they are likely to think about God in a
naturalistic way, as an idea in the human mind rather than as a reality that
nobody can afford to ignore. (Ch. 6: The Wedge, p. 88-89)
CULTURE
Propaganda
The
play [Inherit the Wind] is a fictionalized account of the "Scopes Trial" of 1925
. . . Inherit the Wind is a masterpiece of propaganda, promoting a stereotype of
the public debate about creation and evolution that gives all virtue and
intelligence to the Darwinists. (Ch. 2: Inherit the Wind, p. 25)
What are the
Options?
The culture tells us that we have two alternatives. We can
accept "evolution" as the scientists understand the term, which means that we
accept naturalism and materialism (even if we pretend otherwise). Alternatively,
we can reject evolution_in which case Microphone Man will stereotype us as
premodern fundamentalists who insist on every detail of Genesis regardless of
the evidence. Should we fight, or should we accommodate on the best terms we can
get from the materialists? (Ch. 6: The Wedge, pp. 86-87)
Tough Questions
If
the materialist domination of the intellectual world is seriously called into
question, it will be possible for the next generation of Christians to enter the
universities as participants in the search for truth, not as outsiders who have
no choice but to submit to materialist rules. Instead of retreating from the
public world of reason into the protected territory of faith, they will be
pressing the questions that need to be pressed. Here are just a few of them: Why
should the life of the mind exclude the possibility that a mind is behind our
existence? Why should we assume that modern materialist philosophies are the
wave of the future instead of a holdover from the nineteenth century? If
information is something fundamentally different from matter, what is the
ultimate source of the information? Will science be harmed if it gives up its
ambition to explain everything, or has that ambition only harmed science by
tempting scientists to resort to unsound methods? If materialism is not an
adequate starting point for rationality, what alternatives are there? (Ch. 8:
Stepping off the Reservation, p. 115)
The Marketplace: A Lab
for Ideas
Like it or not, our world is a marketplace for good and bad
ideas just as Athens was in Paul's day. The media and the Internet ensure that
no reservation is sealed off from those ideas. We can do our best to prepare
young people for what is coming, and to protect them for a little while, but in
the end they will have to go out into that marketplace by themselves. (Ch. 8:
Stepping off the Reservation, p. 117)
There is no guarantee that
freedom of inquiry will generate the answers we want_that's why we call it
freedom! This bothers a lot of people, who don't want to participate in a search
for truth unless they are assured in advance that the truth will be one they can
accept. (Ch. 8: Stepping off the Reservation, p. 117)
The Next Step
As
long as the secular intellectual world is irrevocably committed to materialism,
then Christian doctrines like supernatural creation and the resurrection are
false by definition and can hardly survive academic scrutiny. Conversely, if
those doctrines are true, then materialism, as a general worldview, isn't true.
In that case the rules of the secular academy are open to question, to put it
mildly. To step off the reservation to question the rules of the larger society
is to take a great risk, but perhaps also to find a great opportunity. We will
never know how great the opportunity was if we are afraid to take the risk. (Ch.
8: Stepping off the Reservation, p. 118 | 
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