THE LEADING EDGE by Phillip E. Johnson
Freed Science
In August 2011, I attended a conference in Seattle, part of which was devoted to commemorating the 20th anniversary of the original publication of Darwin on Trial. This book, according to the conference participants, changed the world by redefining the terms of the debate between evolution and creation. Changing the terms of that long-deadlocked debate was exactly what I had intended to do, and I hope the conferees were not wrong to credit me with accomplishing so much.
I explained to the conferees, however, that I had not envisioned Darwin on Trial to be quite as provocative as it turned out to be. I had merely hoped to propose a framework for the stalemated evolution–creation debate that would satisfy everyone’s minimal requirements. I expected this framework to enable discussions between the contending parties to make progress toward truth, or at least toward finding a better understanding of why the controversy has been so difficult to resolve.
I believe that Americans overwhelmingly reject the Darwinism that is taught as unchallengeable truth in today’s textbooks, not because they are ignorant, but because they sense that the Darwinian claims go far beyond the evidence and, despite the pro forma expressions of religious neutrality, are aimed at replacing the God who creates everything with an inconsequential God who creates nothing. If this much-weaker God exists, he might just as well not exist, because the job of creating and sustaining the world gets done perfectly well without him. If mindless natural forces can do the whole job without assistance, God becomes superfluous, and hence is easily dismissed from consideration.
Thus, I sought to produce a framework for debate over the respective merits of evolution and creation, which would allow the arguments that were backed by the strongest evidence to prevail. In my naiveté, I thought that the desirability of such a framework would be apparent to all reasonable persons on both sides of the issue.
The Fundamental Claim
My first step in devising this framework was to decide that the all-important fundamental claim of neo-Darwinism, the ruling scientific (i.e., naturalistic) theory of biological evolution, is not that the theory contradicts the Bible, or that a pattern of relationship between species indicates that they derive from a common source. It is that Darwinian science knows of a mechanism that can and did transform the first single-celled microorganism into all the species of plants and animals that have ever existed—including our own Homo sapiens, from Conan the barbarian to Shakespeare, Bach, and Newton, with any intelligent causes both absent and unnecessary.
The theory of biological evolution does not in itself explain how the first living organism emerged from a soup of non-living chemicals, but evolutionary biologists are so encouraged by their supposed success in explaining the entire history of life after the mysterious appearance of the first organism, that they claim to know for sure that the ultimate origin of life also occurred by some combination of chance and chemical law, without the need for any participating intelligence. When knowledgeable critics are about, Darwinists sometimes pretend that the origin of life is not part of their theory, but when they think the coast is clear, they once again claim that the problem was solved in principle long ago.
The assumption that science knows of a naturalistic, mindless mechanism that could and did take life all the way from lifeless chemicals to Homo sapiens is so important that I concluded that critical analysis should, for the time being, put aside such distracting issues as the authority of the Bible or the age of the earth, so all attention could be focused on the naturalistic mechanism of biological creation. Is creative natural selection something that has been proven by evidence and experiment, or is it the product of an a priori philosophical dogma to which the evidence is required to conform? My overriding concern was to explain how this most fundamental question could and should be discussed in the mainstream scientific community and in secular universities.
The way the Darwinists responded convinced me that, for them, the all-important thing is to maintain a position of cultural power, rather than to seek a possibly unwelcome truth by employing truly scientific methods with intellectual honesty. There is too much wealth and influence at stake for those who hold the power to be willing to put their theories at risk of falsification.
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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